December 1, 2002
From the LATimes Sunday Magazine:
The Cost of Apparel Has Declined for a Quarter Century, Helping Make Americans the Best-Clothed People in History. All Is Right in the World, Unless You Ask How It Happened.
By FRED DICKEY
Brenda Pope sits at the kitchen
table and stares sadly at her work-hardened hands. Inside one wrist is
the purple welt of a surgical scar that runs halfway to her elbow. Twenty
years at a sewing machine gave her the carpal tunnel injury. That scar
and $15,000 in severance is what she has to show for those years. Near
the edge of Blue Ridge, Ga., the Levi Strauss plant where she once worked
now sits empty, a glass-and-brick shell overlooking acres of empty parking
lot. Bored security guards stroll the grounds to protect what no one any
longer values. A factory dies an honorable death when it falls apart from
hard work and time. This one was cut down in full productivity.
For a
half-century, this apparel sewing plant was a wellspring that pumped life
into the town. The workday was switched on by the gathering of 400 workers,
mainly women, chattering as they punched the clock. Hour after hour, they
created a cadence from clacking sewing machines, generating wealth for
their bosses and modest wages for themselves.
The plant
was shut in June, one of six Levi plant closures that left the San Francisco
apparel giant with just a tiny U.S. manufacturing presence–a plant in
San Antonio, Texas, devoted to quick turn-around products that have deadlines
overseas plants can’t meet. At the end, the Blue Ridge workers stood in
small knots, tossed about by a maelstrom of emotions. Some were in shock.
Some muttered that they would never again wear Levi clothing. Most worried
about the future. Brenda Pope was one of those.
Blue
Ridge is a town of nearly 2,000 in north Georgia, just south of the Tennessee
and North Carolina lines. Blue-green hills rise sharply a few miles south
of town and provide a gateway to the Appalachians, gaining loveliness as
they gain height. Residents are mostly Scots-Irish, descendants of the
hard-edged people who broke the Cherokees, and then broke the soil. Today,
many here, like Pope, are working poor.
Measured
against what most of us feel we need, the 44-year-old single mother asked
little. She wanted to live among familiar pines and trustworthy people,
create value with her hands and raise her child in the old ways. She did
not think she needed a college degree to do these things. She was right,
until she made the mistake of pricing herself out of the labor market–a
feat accomplished by earning $14 per hour putting zippers in Levi’s famous
blue jeans.
When
Levi moved Pope’s job out of the country, she became one of hundreds of
thousands of American workers who have lost jobs during the past six decades
as the garment industry seeks lower wages in underdeveloped countries.
In that context, the decision to close the Blue Ridge plant was hardly
unusual. Levi had clung to its last U.S. manufacturing plants long after
most of its competitors had fled.
Yet when
a company like Levi, with a reputation for good management and strong relations
with employees, finally turns out the lights in the United States, it might
be an occasion to measure the human toll, here and abroad, of the flight
of garment industry jobs–and to remember that it’s happening so that American
consumers, who buy more clothing than any people in history, can get a
shirt for $20 instead of $25.
In 1950, 1.2 million Americans
were employed in apparel manufacturing. By 2001, that figure had fallen
to 566,000. In the same time span, the U.S. population almost doubled.
Jobs went out of the country, and finished products came in. In 1989, the
U.S. imported $24.5 billion in apparel; in 2001, $63.8 billion. In the
last quarter of 2001, 83% of all apparel sold in this country was imported.
The migration
of these jobs is seen as the natural result of globalization, the economic
process that melds the technology and finance of the developed world with
the vast labor pool of the underdeveloped. This trend is especially attractive
to the apparel industry because, basically, all it needs are sewing machines
and low-paid workers.
Globalization
has crept up so stealthily that it wasn’t generally recognized until full
grown. It accelerated around the end of World War II, when the industrialized
world was reshuffling, says Charles Derber of Boston College, author of
“Corporation Nation,” a book that views corporate power through a populist
filter. As American corporations witnessed the economic rise of Japan and
other foreign competition, they started looking for an edge, and they found
it in cheap labor abroad. “They realized that more money could be made
by using those billions of workers as producers as well as consumers,”
Derber says.
Many
corporate executives view this sea of cheap labor as an attractive profit
center, or, if they find it predatory and distasteful, as a competitive
necessity. Economists say globalization will be the platform for Third
World countries to build their own free-market economies, and that low
wages are part of the growth process.
Michael
M. Weinstein, a New York economist who has studied the job-flight phenomenon,
says of the plight of Pope and others like her: “Any policy you give me
for saving that person’s job is going to threaten somebody else’s. I don’t
mean to sound callous, but there are plenty of low-end jobs [in the U.S.]
that need filling. If we bar low-cost goods from abroad, it would be the
poorest among us who depend on these products who would be punished most
harshly.”
In other
words, it is the poor who would suffer most if, say, clothing at Wal-Mart
suddenly cost more. Weinstein adds, “We don’t need garment jobs to have
full employment for Americans. It’s a good thing when these jobs go to
the worst-off people in the world. I regard it as unconscionable to clamp
down on sweatshops that are making these people’s lives better than they
would otherwise be.”
The search
for the worst-off people in the world means the garment industry is looking
for a target that’s always moving. As soon as wages rise in one country,
work can be moved to another. Charles Kernaghan, director of the National
Labor Committee in New York City, calls this long-distance shuffle a “race
to the bottom” of the wage scale. The committee has a list of hourly apparel
wages in Third World countries, including: Guatemala, 37 cents; China,
28 cents; Nicaragua, 23 cents; Bangladesh, 13 to 20 cents.
In
addition to low wages, manufacturers in many countries benefit from child
labor and long workdays as well as the absence of health plans, environmental
protections, workplace safety standards and efforts to organize workers.
In fairness, some U.S. apparel makers, Levi among them, have taken steps
to police conditions in plants overseas, and to pay fairly. But those efforts
are far from universal.
“American
companies make showcase visits to these offshore plants, but they always
get the VIP tour and are maneuvered to talk only to employees who have
been coached for such occasions,” says Kernaghan, an old-style, angry labor
activist who knows his enemy, doesn’t trust him
and never gets too close.
Levi
Strauss & Co. has taken on the role of dressing people to look sexy
and cool, but the company began in 1853 as a wholesale dry goods business.
Its first garments were work pants made of canvas-type material to serve
workers in dust-clogged mines and on docks. As the years passed, Levi grew,
its sales reaching $4.3 billion by fiscal 2001, and the company expanded
its manufacturing to other parts of the country. Levi became a paragon
of corporate beneficence. It provided benefits, fair wages and even helped
employees earn diplomas. It donated ball fields to the small towns where
it operated. Even unions liked the company.
Ann Woody
was a management employee at the Blue Ridge factory. She remembered when
Bob Haas, a descendant of the founders and Levi’s president and CEO, visited
the plant about a decade ago. Workers planted a tree in his behalf to show
their affection. It was a touching moment of mutual fidelity.
Company
fortunes faltered in the mid-’90s in the face of competition from goods
made overseas. When the time came for Levi to close Blue Ridge, Haas had
become chairman of the board, replaced as president and CEO by Philip A.
Marineau, who was recruited from Pepsi-Cola to “turn this thing around.”
To reduce
labor costs, Marineau had to break the paternal mold that the Haas family
had formed over many years. Journalist Karl Schoenberger wrote in his 2001
book, “Levi’s Children,” that “Levi Strauss is one of the very few major
companies in the apparel industry that has not been indelibly branded a
scoundrel by human rights critics. . . . It has the distinction of trying
harder and far longer than any other multinational corporation to do the
right thing.”
The new
boss was tough enough to say to the workers: Sorry, but this is about money.
Marineau doesn’t do fireside
chats. He’s all business. Asked why the company closed Blue Ridge and turned
out faithful workers, he says: “To be competitive in the marketplace required
us to lower our cost of goods. It required us to go offshore. Apparel prices
have gone down for the last 25 years, and it continues unabated, driven
by an aging population that wants to spend less on clothing.”
In announcing
the six plant closures, Levi said it was becoming a “marketing company,”
and that future production in almost all cases would be by contract manufacturers.
That would take place in 50 countries, including Mexico, Bangladesh and
China.
To author
Derber, that explanation is code language that actually says: We’re going
for the cheap labor, and we don’t want the dirty hands of ownership that
go with sweatshops. The goal is to have “plausible deniability” about labor
conditions. He said that foreign plant owners are rarely steeped in touchy-feely
management techniques and operate with the backing of powerful politicians
who can impede whatever government oversight might technically be on the
books.
Asked
why Levi contracts out its manufacturing, Marineau gives several competitive
business reasons, then he pauses and acknowledges, “The apparel industry
is chasing low-cost labor.”
For Levi,
the advantages became obvious this year. In the third quarter, which ended
Aug. 25, Levi’s sales were up 3.5%, its first increase since 1996. Five
weeks ago came an agreement to sell a new line of lower-priced jeans through
the vast Wal-Mart Stores chain. Marineau predicted that the new Levi Strauss
Signature brand would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales
each year–all from garments made abroad.
To its
credit, Levi has been a pioneer overseas, creating a corporate code of
standards for every manufacturer with which it contracts. Levi also pays
inspectors to enforce the standards. Writer Schoenberger acknowledges Levi’s
effort, but says, “How well they have managed to enforce that code is probably
very debatable,” given the serpentine twists in Third World countries.
In fact,
enforcing the codes of various private groups and international organizations
is not achievable, Weinstein says. Groups such as the World Trade Organization,
NAFTA and the International Labor Organization have no real leverage to
control American multinationals because the United States has such vast
economic clout. “Say the Philippines has a beef against American trade
practices,” he says. “What are they going to do, refuse to do business
with the U.S.?”
That
segues into a main Kernaghan point. The labor activist says that the most
effective step against globalization abuses would be to pass legislation
in the United States prohibiting the entry of goods from countries whose
products fall short of acceptable standards. In other words, the U.S. would
be saying to multinationals operating offshore: We can’t stop you from
making clothing in sweatshops, but you can’t sell it here.
“We have
the power to determine what comes into our country,” says Jay Mazur, retired
president of Unite, the union that traditionally represented most American
apparel workers. “We say cocaine can’t come into our country; so we can
say that goods produced in sweatshops can’t either.”
Kernaghan
and his allies (human rights advocates and some labor unions, but thus
far not many politicians) believe that such legislation would eliminate
the common explanation companies give for abusing humane standards–we
do it because our competitors do. Opponents argue that the law would send
clothing prices higher in the U.S.
Karen
Collis was the president of the Unite local in Blue Ridge. When Levi announced
the closure, there was little the union could do except negotiate severances.
Collis, 31, is luckier than most. She’s bright, young and ambitious. She
has a supportive husband and plans to use her $11,000 severance to pursue
an accounting degree. She may be one of the few for whom being laid off
will be a blessing.
Collis,
though, knows her former co-workers do not need severance packages. They
need employment. She is upset–at the union she believes gave up on the
Blue Ridge plant, at Levi for turning its back on loyal workers, and even
at Mexico, which is where she and other workers heard their jobs are going.
So in
the race to the bottom, is Mexico the next stop?
In the sand-blown Mexican
border town of Piedras Negras, two hours southwest of San Antonio, a mother
of five prays that Collis’ prediction comes true. It won’t. The woman,
who did not want her name used for fear of reprisal at work, lives in a
two-bedroom crumbly stucco house so narrow it seems you can’t open the
back door without closing the front. The tiny front room is filled with
rows of family photos, religious symbols and a snowy old TV that is always
on and seemingly never watched. Even the furniture coverings are threadbare.
At the moment, the room is festive and crowded as several relatives have
gathered for the momentous occasion of this interview. Her children are
almost awkwardly polite and listen as attentively as if this were pay-per-view.
She says
she earns about $55 a week sewing cloth bags at the local factory. Two
years ago, she earned twice that much working on Levi jeans at a large
factory, but it closed and the jobs moved to Central America and the Far
East. The closure left her and her husband, whose own job is spotty, with
far more bills than money.
Today,
she worries that she will fall behind on her sewing quota. She is not as
nimble as she once was. She holds her bladder until lunch or quitting time
to avoid slowing down. She knows that 100 people would line up for her
job, and would gladly take the latest starting wage of about $35 per week.
There is no job security and no one to appeal to because the union in her
plant is as answerable to the company as she is.
This
year’s economic downturn in the U.S. has hurt the Mexican apparel industry,
but most jobs were lost because companies moved to countries with lower
wages, says Julia Quinonez, head of CFO (Border Committee of Women Workers)
in Piedras Negras. She says that 4,500 apparel jobs have disappeared from
that small city in the past three years and that wages have gone from $4
per hour 10 years ago to an average of 80 cents today. Quinonez says the
jobs are going abroad, or farther south in Mexico, where wages are about
60% of those along the border and labor protections are rarely enforced.
Martha
Tovar, president of Solunet-InfoMex, an economic research company in El
Paso, Texas, says that 68 textile plants closed in Mexico last year, depressing
conditions in the border area, including the poor woman’s family in Piedras
Negras. Prices are so high, they cross the border to buy beans and rice,
and occasionally–very occasionally–some chicken or cheap beef. When told
that some housekeepers in L.A. earn her weekly income by lunchtime, the
mother’s eyes widen and she says, “How can that be?”
Her ambition
is to gather her family and slip across the border, where she wishes to
find out if such stories can be true for her. Asked how she would do that,
she shrugs. “I’ll just use a guest pass to cross over, then not return.”
She has
little curiosity about the companies responsible for her wages. She would,
however, like to ask them–whoever they are–“Why is it that you can’t
pay me enough so I can live decently? So that I can feed my family chicken
even once in a while?”
She is
not an economist and she has never heard of globalization, but her instincts
tell her that the job that allows her barely to survive is soon going the
way of thousands of other jobs in her town. In the race to the bottom,
it turns out, Mexico is in the rearview mirror.
Lisa
Rahman would consider that Mexican family blessed with riches, because
$1 an hour far exceeds any amount the 19-year-old garment factory worker
would dare dream of when asleep in her family’s shack. Her closer-to-earth
ambition is to double her income to about 30 cents per hour. That would
mean chicken in her rice maybe once a week.
Rahman
lives with and is the main support for her parents and two young relatives
in the vast slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. All she can afford is one room,
and during the rainy season, the family collects the bedding and moves
to the one dry corner so that they don’t get soaked. She has never gone
to school, ridden a bicycle or seen a movie. Her wages allow the eating
of chicken maybe once every two months. She describes the neighborhood:
“Ninety to 100 people in my neighborhood all use one water pump, one outhouse
and one stove with four burners.”
Rahman
has worked in garment factories since she was 10, the last three years
at the Shah Makhdum factory. She says she often works from 8 a.m. until
10 p.m. seven days a week, with a day off maybe once a month. Her take-home
pay is the equivalent of 14 cents per hour. The factory is hot, and the
drinking water is dirty. If she gets sick and can’t work, she doesn’t get
paid. If she gets sick very often, she’ll be unpaid permanently.
Rahman
is waif-like–about 5 feet and 110 pounds–and has round eyes that float
in her still-young brown skin. Everything about her begs for a protective
arm around her, but that draws her no slack on the job: “If we fail to
meet [production quota], the supervisors yell and curse at us. They curse
our parents and call them filthy [names]. Sometimes they slap us.”
One product
that Rahman worked on most recently was for the Walt Disney Co. of Burbank,
a contract purchaser from the factory. It’s a Winnie the Pooh shirt that
retails for $17.99. Asked to guess the shirt’s retail price in the U.S.,
Rahman says, “About 50 or 100 taka,” which is 86 cents to $1.72.
Rahman
had never heard of Disney, Disneyland or Mickey Mouse until a labor dispute
broke at the plant recently over working conditions. The Disney licensee
promptly suspended its work there–forcing Rahman and others to reverse
field. They are now trying to have the manufacturing resume.
Rahman
says she hopes to work at the plant until she is old.
And what’s
old?
“Thirty.”
A spokesman
for the Disney company, Gary Foster, says of Rahman’s allegations about
the Shah Makhdum plant: “We have visited that plant 12 separate times,
and everything she says about it is untrue.” Asked if Disney garments are
still being produced there, he says, “As far as we know, there is no Disney
licensee making products in that plant.” Asked why he isn’t certain, he
says, “That is the licensee’s decision.”
Bangladesh
is a desperately poor nation of 134 million that needs a lot of Lisa Rahmans
to staff its 3,300 sewing factories. The country provides garments for
most major American apparel manufacturers, including Levi. In 2000, Bangladesh
companies made 924 million garments for U.S. companies with a wholesale
customs value of $2.2 billion.
Recently,
however, the Bangladesh minister of commerce complained that wages in other
countries, such as China, were undercutting laborers in his nation. That
is not surprising to labor activist Kernaghan. He says that fickle multinationals
have found new low-wage destinations, and China heads the list.
Richard
H. Dekmejian, an international relations expert at USC, makes a judgment
on where globalization is leading us: “Third World countries have no
choice but to let these companies operate so their teeming populations
don’t die of hunger. People take what crumbs they’re able to catch. But
the overall impact of globalization is that the rich get richer and the
poor starve. That will eventually lead to an explosion. It’s inevitable.”
Union
veteran Mazur is more sanguine. “The world sees us as the great economic
engine, and they just want it to work for them, too. By giving the world
fair wages for labor, we would create social stability, and make peace
more possible.”
Sitting
at the table with Brenda Pope is her 11-year-old son, Brian. He’s a chubby,
pleasant boy, well-mannered in a “yes sir, no ma’am” way that sounds almost
quaint to a Southern California ear. Brian was found to have lupus a year
ago, and he has red splotches on his face and arms caused by the disease,
which can kill if it’s not carefully–and expensively–controlled. He can
do nothing about his face, but he reflexively tries to cover his sleeveless
arms. When I ask if he would mind playing outside for a while, he complies
without a murmur. When he’s gone, I ask his mother how he’s doing.
“Lots
of kids give him a hard time. They call him pizza face and stuff like that.
It just breaks my heart. He once asked me, ‘Momma, are you ashamed of how
I look?’ When the doctor told him about the lupus, the only question he
had was, ‘Am I gonna die?’ “
Pope
has been pushed around by life, but some of it was her own doing, and she
knows it; to wit: the two men she married, including Brian’s father, whom
she divorced 10 years ago. The look on her face as she discusses them tells
me I could write the familiar script. “I dropped out of school; figured
I could live on love. I was stupid, I reckon,” she says with a hollow laugh.
When
Pope switches attention to her lost job, she says she anticipates drudging
trips to the welfare and unemployment offices, and endless job hunts that
promise little for her limited skills. She could flip burgers for about
$6 an hour–if they’d hire a middle-aged woman with a G.E.D. and an old-fashioned
work ethic–but that wouldn’t be enough to save her house and pay the costs
of treating her son’s sickness. “I’d dig ditches if the pay’s good,” she
says.
Helen
M. Lewis, who also lives near Blue Ridge, is an author and authority on
the familiar Appalachian struggle to make a living. She doesn’t know Pope,
but she has known thousands in the same situation. “I’m sorry to say it,
but she’ll probably lose her house and move onto her parents’ property
with a trailer home. It’s an old pattern. There are millions of people
in this country like her who want to be productive workers and who are
content to live marginally middle-class lives; instead, they become dependent
on society because large corporations tromp on them chasing more profits
from sweatshop foreign workers.”
No one
in Blue Ridge, currently, is looking for a woman who has sewn a couple
million zippers into pants. In fact, not many in Blue Ridge are looking
for anyone. The town is rapidly turning into a mountain resort of antique
shops, summer houses for rich Atlantans, and retirement and convalescent
homes. In job-availability shorthand, that comes down to bedsheets and
bedpans serving those low-paying industries.
The state
of Georgia has set up a job agency for the former Levi workers. State employees
eagerly staff job banks, but for far too few positions. They encourage
people who can’t type to learn computer skills, and provide some funding
to go back to college or trade school. That’s of marginal value to middle-aged
people conditioned to manual work and who, in any event, can’t afford to
stop working while going to school.
Brian
is invited back to the kitchen table. He listens to his mother vent at
her ex-employer. Levi was part of the Pope family. Her mother worked there
for 26 years before retiring, and three other members of her immediate
family were let go with Brenda. “Four of us are out of a job.” It’s as
though another husband took off.
“They
said they was going to give us a commemorative denim bag.” She pauses for
the irony of that to settle. “Twenty years, and I get a denim bag made
out of the same damn scraps I threw in a basket?” She laughs. “I just can’t
wait to get that denim bag.” Brian chuckles, too, but isn’t sure why. Asked
about his mother’s situation, he responds with a child’s heart. He smiles
at her proudly and says he wants to give back his allowance to help out.
She hugs him tightly. As I walk down the driveway, I look back and see
Brenda and Brian Pope standing on the step holding hands.
American
consumers are blessed in many ways. As the nation’s standard of living
has risen and the cost of clothing has dropped, homes have grown bigger,
as have closets. Shopping for clothes has become a pastime for millions
of people because they can afford to do it regularly. Thanks to this
Levi closure, we can buy, say, five shirts for $100 instead of four.
The
cost of having that fifth shirt? Higher welfare, health-care and job retraining
costs for hard-working people like Brenda Pope, the shrinking lives of
people like Lisa Rahman and the family in Piedras Negras, and perhaps the
explosion forecast by Dekmejian.
It is part of the American
character to believe that things will always get better. However, many
poor countries are mired in the depression that says bad things never change.
Both are often right.
On March
25, 1911, 275 young immigrant women who sewed garments for six bucks a
week were about to go home. It was quitting time in the cluttered Triangle
Shirtwaist Company factory in Manhattan. A fire broke out and spread quickly
through clutter on the floor. The rush to get out turned to panic as they
realized they were trapped on the upper floors, where the doors opened
inward. Many leapt onto pavement from eight stories up. At the end, 146
died. Photographs of their bodies laid in an orderly line on the sidewalk
shocked America. In response, laws were passed establishing workplace safety
standards. Wage laws eventually followed, decreeing that apparel workers
should not only not die, but their lives should be worth living.
Ninety
years later, on Nov. 25, 2000, a fire broke out on the fourth floor at
the Chowdhury Knitwear factory in Narsingdi, Bangladesh. It darted across
the factory floor and enveloped tables piled with shirts. A can of solvent
exploded into a fireball. Someone grabbed an extinguisher. It was broken.
The 1,250 apparel workers panicked. Some dashed to the roof, where they
were cornered and jumped to their deaths. Some raced down the stairs to
the main exit, where they discovered the metal gate was locked. As their
pounding went unanswered, others piled up behind them. Fifty-two workers
died, mostly young women and children. The factory was soon back in production.
No new laws were passed and nothing much changed, except about 50 new faces
at the sewing machines.
Arthur Magazine 