No Globalization Without Representation

In El Salvador, you can have someone killed for less than $12. That's what I discovered two weeks ago, when I met other anti-sweatshop activists from Central America.

They told me chilling stories about the difficulties they encounter. One was a union organizer from El Salvador named Jiovanni. Just weeks ago, the company he was trying to organize told him how much it would cost to have him killed: 100 colones, which is the equivalent of about $11.40. What's that to this company, when every hat made in the sweatshops Jiovanni was trying to organize sells for $20? In the past months, this organizer has even been personally attacked by the president of El Salvador--for his efforts to improve conditions there. The national newspapers attacked him as a traitor to his country for his coming to the U.S. two weeks ago to meet with students like me.

In El Salvador, 80,000 people--almost all of which are young women--work in sweatshops. They are paid pennies per hour. They travel for hours to get to the factory. They work from 6:45 a.m. until at least 8 p.m. They work six days a week, 60 hours a week. They are allowed one bathroom break each morning and another at night. They are denied clean drinking water and clean air. They face forced overtime virtually everyday. They are forced to take birth control pills and pregnancy tests and are fired if they become pregnant. They are fired for saying the word "union." They live in shacks. They are as young as 16.

And these conditions exist across the globe.

In El Salvador, the cost of the labor for a $15 T-shirt amounts to all of three cents. The material costs total less than$1.50. There is plenty of room for a living wage and decent working conditions to coexist with corporate profits.

So why is a man working to improve the lives of the people of El Salvador attacked by his own government and media as a traitor? If even the El Salvadoran government recognizes that a person receiving the legal minimum wage lives in "extreme poverty," why are sweatshops permitted to exist?

The answer is this: The kind of trade promoted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) locks these workers into sweatshops. Fifty thousand people protested the WTO meeting in Seattle because the WTO is an astonishing consolidation of corporate power. It has the power to override and do away with any labor, human rights and environmental standards with any democratic notions and with any transparency or responsibility that interferes with corporate profits. The rise of global sweatshops is just one effect of the rise of corporate power and of its globalizing reach. The WTO's kind of trade--trade that pretends to have no consequences--pits workers from El Salvador against workers from China in a race to see who can be the most exploited.

One need not oppose the idea of a global economy to oppose the WTO's agenda; one need only despise the erosion of democracy that comes from putting corporate profits before human rights.

When corporations can shirk their responsibilities, and can cut and run to the cheapest workforce, nations become desperate to retain the jobs they can, whatever the social cost. For these workers, "free trade" is anything but that. They are denied their freedoms--freedoms of speech and of association--and denied their basic human rights by the same trade that enriches the people behind the WTO.

Are these workers protectionists? Are they against trade? Of course not.

But they know the kind of trade advertised as "free trade" comes at a tremendous price. And it is not the corporations who will pay. For the past two years, the Progressive Student Labor Movement's (PSLM) anti-sweatshop campaign has fought to turn Harvard and its apparel licensing from an appendage of corporate America into a weapon against globalization without representation--the WTO's brand of trade. Because the sweatshirts, baseball caps and T-shirts that bear our schools' names are made in sweatshops across the globe, we can fight international injustice where we live, and bring attention to the realities that the WTO ignores.

Students cannot accept a world where people our age are denied an education because they must work for pennies, without clean air, without clean water and without their rights. No trade is worth that.

If Harvard is to stop enabling oppression in developing nations like El Salvador, it must join the Workers Rights Consortium of other concerned schools. This organization operates on the principles of full disclosure and transparency. Harvard's membership in the Workers Rights Consortium's rival, corporate Fair Labor Association only lends legitimacy to a wildly compromised cover-up attempt.

And while the student anti-sweatshop movement has had a heartening string of recent successes, we wouldn't have to do this work at all if it were not for flawed organizations like the WTO.

We look forward to a time when the conditions of life in our world will not be determined by secret meetings in the corporate interest, but by considerations for human needs and political rights.

Benjamin L. McKean '02 is a social studies concentrator in Cabot House. He is a member of the Progressive Student Labor Movement and part of its anti-sweatshop campaign.