Let's pull the curtain and look at a police line-up of some of the most thuggish members of organized crime in America today. They don't have names like "Scarface" or "Bugsy," as mobsters of old did, but decidedly uptown names like: Tommy Hilfiger, J. Crew, The Limited, Nordstrom, The Gap, Lord & Taylor, Sears, J.C. Penney and Lane Bryant.
These brand-name dons of modern mobbism are among 18 prominent corporations that have had a billion-dollar class-action law suit filed against them for engaging in an organized racketeering conspiracy. Their racket is not dealing drugs, but conspiring with sweatshop owners to deal in indentured servitude.
Some 5,000 miles away from our shores is a place in the South Pacific called the Northern Mariana Islands, where these upright corporate citizens are involved in a pernicious, tightly-organized sweatshop system that brutally exploits thousands of workers who make clothing for them to sell to you and me.
The system works like this: (1) Investors from China, Korea or Taiwan have built sewing factories in the Marianas; (2) "Recruiters" then scour the back roads of Bangladesh and other impoverished Asian nations to find workers, mostly uneducated girls and young women, who will come to these factories, enticing them with promises of a brighter future and well-paying jobs (at least by Bangladeshi standards, where incomes average $250 a year); (3) The workers find upon arrival that their "bright future" is a hell hole:
• Their passports are confiscated;
• The fine print in their contracts has stripped them of their basic rights, from the right to practice their own religion to the right to ask for a raise;
• They sit on hard benches and sew for up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week for pathetic wages that won't meet their elementary needs, much less the golden promises their recruiter made;
• They are screamed at, groped, and harassed by supervisors;
• The factories literally are sweatshops with poor ventilation in the broiling heat of the South Pacific, and there might be only a couple of functioning bathrooms for a factory with several hundred women;
• They live eight to a room in guarded, prison-like company barracks that are locked at night and encircled with barbed wire;
• They would try to leave, but they have no passports or money, plus they fear disgrace for them and their families if they return in failure;
(4) About 40,000 Asian immigrants work in this hellish system, churning out boatloads of clothing from what essentially are forced labor camps; and (5) The willing buyer arrives, which is the key component for making the whole ugly system work, thus bringing us full circle to the brand-name racketeers.
The code of misconduct
The initial weasel tactic used by the U.S. peddlers of these sweatshop-stained products is ignorance: "What? You mean there's exploitation? We had no idea! It's those darned foreign factory owners, not us." But, of course, their buyers and quality-control people go there again and again. ... [ read more ]
Help us out by throwing some cash in the bucket:
Despite a constant racket from the forces of the far-out right (Fox television's yackety-yackers, just-say-no GOP know-nothings, tea-bag howlers, Sarah Palinistas, et al.), the great majority of Americans support a bold progressive agenda for our country, ranging from Medicare for all to the decentralization and re-regulation of Wall Street. Indeed, in the elections of 2006 and 2008, people voted for a fundamental break from Washington's 30-year push to enthrone a corporate kleptocracy.
