UNITED STATES: TV Host Allows Monitors at Central American Plants/RPTING

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, May 23 1996 (IPS) - U.S. labour activists are praising a decision by a popular U.S. television host to allow human rights monitors at Central American factories where her special clothing line is made as a breakthrough in improving working conditions.

Kathie Lee Gifford, host of the popular ABC show ‘Live with Regis and Kathie Lee’, decided to allow independent monitoring of plants where a special line of ‘Kathie Lee’ clothing is manufactured following reports that girls as young as 13 were forced to work long hours under armed guard at the factories.

Now, Gifford says, she intends to make amends for the poor conditions which workers on Kathie Lee clothing, from New York to Nicaragua, have faced. She says she will allow independent human rights monitors at factories making Kathie Lee clothes.

That task, in turn, will require the support of the Wal-Mart retail conglomerate, which sells Kathie Lee clothes, and Kellwood, a U.S. company that arranges their manufacture.

“This step by Ms. Gifford took courage,” says the Rev. David Dyson, a Brooklyn pastor who heads the People of Faith Network. He argues that negotiated, signed agreements from Wal-Mart and Kellwood to allow independent monitoring would greatly approve working conditions at all their plants worldwide.

“Other U.S. retailers and manufacturers must also now hear this message loud and clear: Respect for human rights is important to the U.S. consumer,” adds Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labour Committee (NLC), which first brought the abuses of Kathie Lee clothing workers to light.

Gifford confronted embarrassing publicity when the NLC testified to a U.S. Congressional committee this month that a Honduran plant where Kathie Lee clothes were made in 1995, employed teenage girls. The girls often worked 13-hour shifts in locked and guarded factoriesand were paid 31 cents an hour — or about one-thirteenth of the U.S. minimum wage, Kernaghan notes.

One Honduran girl, Suyapa Johana Nolasco Guerra, who began work at the Global Fashion plant when she was 13, testified that she and other workers were forced to work extra hours and holidays without overtime.

“They fire (the workers) without justification, and they don’t pay us our rights (severance pay),” she complained.

Kernaghan added in testimony to the Congressional commitee that, “like many assembly plants offshore, Global Fashion was and is a humiliating place to work. The women — about 80 percent of the (workers) are women, the majority of them very young — need to raise their hand to receive permission to use the bathrooms, which are kept locked.”

When news broke of the conditions at Global Fashion, Gifford responded by noting that Wal-Mart had ceased producing clothing in Honduras entirely.

But Kernaghan notes the U.S. conglomerate made the switch simply because “they got a better deal” in Nicaragua, where apparel workers earn even less — only some 24 cents an hour, or about three percent what U.S. workers would make for the same job.

The final straw for Gifford, ironically, occurred not in Central America but in New York.

The New York Daily News discovered that ‘Seo Fashions’, a garment factory in Manhattan, contracted to manufacture Kathy Lee clothing, allegedly refused to pay workers overtime and withheld their wages. Seo Fashions also paid workers less than the 4.25 dollars per hour minimum wage.

“We want to see them paid, and paid properly,” Gifford told the Daily News. “We don’t want any human being degraded in any way in the manufacture of any product with my name on it, or any product, period.”

John Lupo, a senior vice-president for Wal-Mart, said some sub- contractors were contracting out work to companies without Wal- Mart’s approval, and that Wal-Mart would sever its relationship with them.

Unions here have doubted such reassurances coming from the main apparel conglomerates.

Major retailers have good reason to suspect that clothes were made in sweatshops if sub-contractors get them produced at absurdly low cost, notes Muzaffar Chishti of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). Yet the companies often turn a blind eye to those practises until they are found out, he adds.

Kellwood, the company that arranges manufacture of Kathie Lee clothing, itself was cited by Labour Secretary Robert Reich this week for using illegal sweatshop labour in Dallas and Boston.

Groups like NLC, however, have been successful in recent months targeting the corporate image of the larger companies. Last December, the NLC and People of Faith Network prodded ‘The Gap’, an apparel retailer, to allow human rights monitoring at its plants in El Salvador following a brief consumer boycott. Gifford’s response has been similarly swift.