The Ridge at Fox Run

Wal-Mart Sweatshop

Made Not in America

This article is from the May 9, 2000 edition of MSNBC

WASHINGTON, May 9 — At the White House Tuesday they were rolling out all the big guns for the battle that is coming on trade with China. President Clinton and a bi-partisan group that included former Presidents Carter and Ford were supporting a bill that would grant permanent normal trade relations to China. But a new report
claims that U.S. companies are committing human rights abuses by using China sweatshops to produce their goods. Human rights advocates and some labor leaders are working hard to defeat the bill.

A HIGH-PROFILE human rights advocate has given NBC News a new report, inluding photos, about what he says are Chinese labor abuses. He went to factories where
goods that are sold in some of the United States’ biggest stores are made.

There is a factory near Beijing that the Chinese government allows outsiders to see. One woman there gets 75 cents an hour for stitching collars for Wal-Mart. But a new report by an organization that opposes a trade agreement with China claims there are other factories the government doesn’t show you — sweatshops where young Chinese women enduring inhumane conditions make products for some of the biggest companies in America like Wal-Mart, Nike, Timberland and Stride Rite, producing everything from shoes to car stereos and televisions.
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Terms of the deal

The U.S.-China trade deal obligates Beijing to cut tariffs an average 23 percent.
Among other things:

Main points:

• Foreign companies will soon be able to own 50 percent of joint telecommunications ventures.

• Foreigners may invest in Internet companies.

• China will double foreign film imports and share distribution revenues with foreign firms.

• U.S. banks can offer services to Chinese firms by 2002 and to individual
Chinese by 2005.

• China will reduce tariffs on automobiles to 25 percent by 2006 from the
current 80 to 100 percent.

• China will reduce agricultural tariffs to 14.5 from 15 percent and eliminate all export subsidies.

Associated Press




“U.S. companies, and their contractors, are
systematically violating the rights of these young workers,”
said Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor
Committee for Human Rights. “Below-subsistence wages.
Extremely long overtime hours.”
Nike immediately attacked his findings as “biased” and
said its suppliers’ factories pay fairly and are “the best in
China.”
Kernaghan said he posed as an academic to visit some
of the factories himself, and used locals to investigate others,
then smuggled photographs out of China. In one factory he
saw 16-year-olds gluing together Keds sneakers.
“They’re handling toxic chemicals with their bare
hands,” Kernaghan said.
Stride Rite, which sells Keds, had no comment.
And there is a bag bought at a Wal-Mart in Indiana
and traced through shipping records back to a factory in
southern China, where Kernaghan claims workers were
paid 3 cents an hour.
“You couldn’t go any lower,” he said. “This was
indentured servitude.”

COMPANIES CLAIM INNOCENCE
Wal-Mart said it “has no record of doing business”
with that factory in southern China and works daily “to
improve factory conditions around the world.”
None of these factories are directly owned or operated
by American firms.
Is there any actual proof that these companies are
aware of these conditions?
“They have quality control people going in and out of
these factories, monitoring the production,” Kernaghan said.
“And in fact they claim to do audits.”
On Tuesday, the companies NBC spoke to said they
take human and workers’ rights seriously and attempt to
monitor conditions in factories. A supporter of the China
trade pact chalks much of the report up to politics.




“They will take this report as everybody does in a
battle like this and they’ll march it around to all the
undecideds in Congress and say, ‘You should not be doing
China a favor. Look at how terrible they are,’” said Robert
Kapp of the U.S.-China Business Council.
Former President Gerald Ford said a vote in Congress
against the pending trade agreement would hurt the U.S.
economy.
“The facts are, a negative vote in the House and/or the
Senate would be catastrophic, disastrous, to American
agricultrue, in electronics, telecommunications, autos and
countless other products and services,” he said.
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That vote, in two weeks, will be one of the major
legislative showdowns of the year.
Despite tremendous pressure from organized labor, the
White House and its Republican allies are confident the
House will approve the trade agreement later this month, a
deal they claim will improve human and workers rights in
China.