U.S.-HONDURAS: Sweatshop Dispute Snares Television Host

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, May 2 1996 (IPS) - What do sweatshop labour conditions in a Honduras clothing assembly plant have to do with Kathie Lee Gifford, one of U.S. television’s most famed daytime talk show hosts?

Plenty, according to the National Labour Committee (NLC), a New York group that monitors human rights in Central American companies.

For one thing, the NLC says, many items of Gifford’s personal line of clothing — ‘Kathie Lee’ clothes — were assembled during 1995 at a plant in Choloma, Honduras, called ‘Global Fashion’, where girls as young as 13 and 14 worked day-long shifts to assemble clothes. The NLC estimates that about a tenth of the 1,000 workers at Global Fashion were between 13 and 15 years old.

The Kathie Lee clothing line, marketed exclusively by the ‘Wal- Mart’ U.S. retail chain, shares its namesake’s lofty reputation, and Gifford notes that 10 percent of the line’s profits go to children’s charities.

But the Global Fashion plant, notes NLC executive director Charles Kernaghan, would pay the Honduran women only 25 cents for every 20-dollar pair of pants they sewed — just slightly more than one percent of the retail price.

Testifying before Congress Monday at hearings run by the Democratic Policy Committee, Kernaghan painted a horrifying picture of Global Fashion employees working 75 hours a week, and sometimes straight through the night, to sew Kathie Lee clothing.

“Like many assembly plants offshore, Global Fashion was and is a humiliating place to work,” Kernaghan told the committee.

“The women — about 80 percent of the (workers) are women, the majority of them very young — need to raise their hands to receive permission to use the bathrooms, which are kept locked,” he said. “Bathroom privileges are limited to two visits per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.”

NLC investigators also reported that women are physically searched so they cannot bring food into the plants, and are prohibited from talking with each other during work hours. Kernaghan noted the plant has hired at least four armed guards who intimidate the women, and discourages organising among them.

One typical story comes from Suyapa Johana Nolasco Guerra, a 15- year-old Honduran girl who worked for Global Fashion from 1994, when she was just 13, until a year later. She was fired for writing down the day’s production goal.

When a Korean supervisor, whom she called Mr. Han, saw her writing on a piece of paper, he immediately screamed at her not to write anything and insisted that she be fired, Nolasco recalls. Other workers were similarly threatened and fired without justification, she says.

Nolasco argues that arbitrary treatment was just one of many abuses the workers encountered. “The supervisors make us work on holidays, telling us that they are going to pay double. They even make us work on Sundays, and don’t pay us double but straight time,” she says.

She adds that sometimes, her employers would give the workers production goals of 3,000 to 4,000 pieces per day — almost an impossible task.

Such tales of labour woes have threatened to taint the image of Gifford, one of the co-hosts of the ABC network’s popular morning show, ‘Live with Regis & Kathie Lee’.

Defending herself of any linkage to the Global Fashion abuses, a weeping Gifford personally threatened legal action against Kernaghan and asked him, “How dare you?”

She denied any knowledge of the problems, saying that when she was informed of abuses at the plant, “I immediately called Wal- Mart and said, ‘This is obscene if this is happening’. They said, ‘That happened months ago; we found out about it and took care of it’.”

Wal-Mart in fact wrote to the NLC recently to agree with the group’s findings and to declare they would henceforth “blacklist” Glabal Fashion, no longer sending any contracts there. But Kernaghan contends that action would miss the point.

“You don’t exploit the kids for a year and then walk away and get off scot-free,” Kernaghan argues. “They owe these kids something.”

One source familiar with Wal-Mart’s decision, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says the retailer pulled out of Honduras solely because “they got a better deal in Nicaragua.” The source adds that, although Wal-Mart says it left Global Fashion because “they found conditions were poor in Honduras”, conditions are no better — and wages are less — in Nicaragua.

Rather than closing up shop with Global Fashion, Kernaghan says, Wal-Mart and Gifford should agree to have independent human rights monitoring in their Honduras plants — as well as in Nicaragua and other places where Kathie Lee clothes are being sewn.

The Gap, in an agreement with the NLC last December, agreed to such human rights monitoring of the ‘Mandarin’ assembly plant in El Salvador, where its clothes are sewn and which has been reported to mistreat child workers. The Gap signed the agreement after a brief consumer boycott in the United States.

The agreement — which has led to the monitoring of Mandarin by the Archdiocese of San Salvador and the Salvadoran ‘Centra’ labour research institute — is rapidly becoming a model to ensure labour rights in other industries and countries, Kernaghan says.

Whether Gifford wants to use her considerable prestige to push a similar agreement is another matter entirely. On Thursday, Gifford said on her show, to audience applause, that U.S. children should be the priority, not those elsewhere.

“You don’t help the children in the United States by exploiting children offshore; that’s nonsense,” Kernaghan says. “I think her emotions are misplaced. She’s not the victim. The victims are the young kids at the plant.”