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NEWS & LETTERS, February - March 2007Woman as ReasonGlobalization and women workersby Terry Moon Now that Democrats control Congress, there is hope among women's organizations that the proposed labor bill confronting human rights violations in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands will finally pass. The Mariana Islands are a haven for textile sweatshops because 1) they are not required to pay the U.S. minimum wage, 2) they are exempt from the Immigration and Nationality Act, and 3) they are allowed to use the label "Made in USA." Reforms are greatly needed, as the mostly Chinese, Filipina, and Thai women immigrant workforce is exploited, getting $3.05 per hour, if they are paid at all, forced to work six days a week, including some 20-hour days. Most are thousands of dollars in debt to so-called "recruiters," who got them the jobs, often under false pretenses; additionally, many pay for company-supplied housing and food to the tune of $2,100 a year. That these women are fighting to stay is an indictment of how horrible conditions are for them back home. WORKERS’ LIVES IN RUINS Despite the hope of passage of a woefully insipid bill requiring companies to "gradually" increase the minimum wage, an article in MS. MAGAZINE acknowledges that an "even more ominous" problem threatens: the decline of the textile industry in the Islands. What is afflicting the Mariana Islands is not a local problem. Rather the lifting of the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) two years ago, which effectively ended clothing quotas and restrictions for developing countries, has unleashed China to flood the market with textiles made with super-exploited labor, an efficient and developed infrastructure, with ready access to homegrown cotton. The result means the ruin of a global workforce that is 75% to 90% women from some of the poorest countries on earth. This is a small fraction of the devastation which only promises to get worse:
What these statistics mean to the individuals is tragic: loss of income for whole families, women's dreams of moving their children out of abject poverty smashed. Women who leave home to travel sometimes thousands of miles for a job can't just return to their previous lives. Hundreds of thousands of the newly unemployed end up in the flourishing sex trade, putting their lives in danger from AIDS and violence. One does have to work to ameliorate such suffering, but without a revolutionary perspective, the feminist movement can be lulled into thinking that such halfway measures as the new labor law are more than raggedy bandaids. Even the ethical buying codes that college students strongly agitate for are being found somewhat ineffective. There has been no increase in union membership, women still suffer deep discrimination, and there is no guarantee of a living wage. While there has been improvement in things like health, safety and working hours because these are easy to quantify, everything else stays the same or gets worse. And even those advances are questionable, as China has created clever computer programs that cook the books on wages and working hours--a scheme that will sweep the industry. HUNGER STRIKE IN MARIANA ISLANDS None of this can stop the workers' revolt. In the Mariana Islands at the giant plant that is planning to close, the women went on a hunger strike through mid-December. When it ended, they staged a sitdown strike that halted garment shipments. They demanded an overdue government tax rebate and reimbursement of recruiter fees. They held a vigil, threatened to renew the hunger strike, called for justice, marched on the hotel owned by the same corporation that manages their factory and occupied its largest meeting room. What keeps them fighting for these jobs? As one worker said, in China she would make less than a dollar a day. What is happening to women in the textile trade worldwide is a horrible example of capitalism's werewolf hunger for ever more surplus value. Laws and codes may temporarily slow it down, but capitalism will recognize no limits to its self-expansion. While revolution has become unthinkable to many, including many feminists, it is delusional to imagine that capitalism actually works for those who have to live under it, or has a human direction. Just ask any garment worker who has lost her job. |
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