Honduran Sweatshops

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Honduran Sweatshops

Photograph

By: Ginnette Riquelme

Date: October 29, 2003

Source: AP Images.

About the Photographer: The Associated Press is a worldwide news agency based in New York.

INTRODUCTION

The rap musician and businessman Sean P. Diddy Combs (1969–) is the owner of two fashion clothing lines, Sean John and Sean by Sean Combs. The workers in this picture are sewing shirts for the Sean John clothing line at a factory owned by Southeast Textiles, S.A. in Choloma, Cortés, Honduras. In 2003, the factory employed 380-400 workers in two buildings—an older building housing laundry, cutting, packing, and warehousing facilities and a newer building housing fifteen production lines, each employing fifteen to eighteen sewers. One of these production lines is pictured here. Eighty percent of the factory's output was Combs's Sean John clothing line (long-sleeved t-shirts and SJb9 Ski Division sweatshirts) and the remaining twenty percent was long-sleeved t-shirts for Rocawear, a clothing line co-founded by another rap artist, Jay-Z. Other Sean John clothing line items are made in Vietnam and China.

Controversy erupted around Combs when the National Labor Committee in Support of Human and Worker Rights (NLC) released a detailed report in 2003 stating that working conditions at Southeast Textiles were exploitative. The NLC is a New York-based, nonprofit labor-rights group founded in 1981 that says it "investigates and exposes human and labor rights abuses committed by U.S. companies producing goods in the developing world." The 2003 report included interviews with factory workers at Southeast Textiles, allegations about specific abusive working conditions, and an interview with the Human Rights Ombudsman of Honduras, Dr. Ramon Custodio. (The Human Rights Ombudsman's office is a Honduran government office set up in the 1990s to monitor human rights abuses in that country; about 100 nations, worldwide, have set up Human Rights Ombudsman's offices.) The NLC report was bolstered by pay stubs, bathroom passes, bills of lading, and other evidence.

According to the NLC, employees in the factory worked mandatory 11-12 hour shifts without overtime, were paid the Honduran equivalent of $0.75-$0.98 per hour, were required to sew a Sean John sweatshirt or long-sleeved t-shirt every 14.4 minutes or a short-sleeved t-shirt every 3.75 minutes, and were forbidden to talk. Drinking water supplied to workers sometimes contained excrement, women were required to take pregnancy tests and were fired if found to be pregnant, and no workers were entered in the Honduran Social Security Health Care system. Regarding the latter point, the Honduran Human Rights Ombudsman stated, "This is illegal, a violation of the law because every worker should have the protection of Social Security."

After the NLC report was released, several large U.S. news organizations picked up the story and it was widely reported that Combs was profiting from a sweatshop. (Any factory where workers work long hours, receive very low pay, and must endure dangerous, abusive, or otherwise illegal conditions is known as a sweatshop.) Combs held a press conference on October 28, 2003, in which he stated that he knew from his childhood "what it's like to struggle day after day in a job to put food on the table" and was unaware that his fashion lines might be produced using sweatshop labor. He promised to investigate the NLC's charges.

Later in 2003, the NLC reported that the most abusive supervisors at the Southeast Textiles factory had been fired, overtime was being paid, workers could use the bathroom without getting a pass, filtered drinking water was being supplied, air conditioning had been installed, workers were about to be entered in the Social Security system, workers believed that mandatory pregnancy testing was about to be ended, and a union had been organized and recognized. In a 2005 interview, the Director of the NLC said, "Sean Combs didn't pull out of the factory, and he did the right thing. But it took a lot of public embarrassment for him to make any improvements."

PRIMARY SOURCE

HONDURAN SWEATSHOPS

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

Low wages for workers can translate directly into higher profits for manufacturers because low wages reduce the cost of production. For example, according to the NLC, each Sean John t-shirt produced by Southeast Textiles, S.A. cost only $3.65 for a wholesale buyer in the U.S. in 2003. This cost included labor, materials, shipping to the United States, and profits earned by Southeast Textiles. Since a worker was paid only $0.15 for sewing a shirt, labor comprised only four percent of the shirt's cost to the wholesale importer. The same shirts were sold in U.S. stores for $30 each, so the labor cost was less than one half of one percent of the final retail price. Other hip-hop focused clothing companies such as Perry Ellis, Karl Kani, and Timberland have also been accused of contracting with foreign factories that employ sweatshop labor. According to China Labour Watch, in 2004 workers were paid only $0.55 to produce a pair of Timberland boots that retails for up to $85.

The controversy over the production of apparel in sweatshops is part of a larger controversy about economic globalization. Critics of the globalization of manufacturing and marketing argue that manufacturers locate their factories in countries where workers are so desperate for income that they will endure extremely low wages and abusive conditions. Defenders of globalization argue that foreign employers pay higher wages than local ones and actually raise living standards by establishing their factories in foreign countries.

Efforts to produce clothing lines without using sweatshop labor have been made. For example, No Sweat, a clothing line of "urban apparel" based in Bangor, Maine, features only clothes made by unionized workers. Opponents of such efforts argue that withdrawing business from low-wage factories in poorer countries—whether these factories can technically be classed as sweatshops or not—actually harms poor workers rather than helping them. Some sweatshop opponents reply that their efforts are aimed at improving working conditions in these factories, rather than at closing them.