Put on a Hippy Face

[EC]

Too much to choose from, you must read it:


Put on a Hippy Face



<snip>


Free-market economists and spokespeople for big business do their best to portray sweatshop workers as grateful for any work at all, and applaud themselves and each other for their humanitarianism. Urban Outfitters founder and President Richard Hayne, who acknowledges that the company and its affiliates -- Anthropologie and Free People -- use non-union overseas sewing shops to make their ueber-trendy clothing lines, has argued that some of the women sewing clothes for him in India had no other potential source of income aside from "selling their bodies." When asked why workers can't be paid more for their labor, the response is always that higher wages would necessarily lead to layoffs and skyrocketing consumer prices.

But the executives overseeing the abuses take home salaries amounting to thousands of times more than the wages paid to the factory workers. Sweatshop Watch reported recently that workers making Levi's jeans in Saipan (a U.S. territory in the Pacific) earned $3.05 per hour, while Levi's CEO Philip Marineau was compensated to the tune of $11,971 per hour -- almost 15 times what he was paid in 2001. Even by simply freezing Marineau's salary at its 2001 levels, Levi's could have given each of the 7,500 workers in Saipan earning minimum wage a 50 per cent raise.

This tremendous imbalance is not uncommon. A BBC special report on Gap found that 12-year-olds making Gap clothes in Cambodia worked seven days a week and earned 12 cents an hour. Meanwhile, Gap CEO Millard Drexler was paid $8 million a year, as well as $12 million in stock options. Abercrombie & Fitch garment workers in Saipan earned $3.05 in 1999, while CEO Michael Jeffries was paid a salary of $4 million. In that same year the company was slapped with a lawsuit alleging responsibility for sweatshop conditions, including locked fire exits, rat-infested barracks, contaminated water, and hundreds of other violations of OSHA's labor regulations. These findings and more are outlined in the Behind the Label report .

Made in the U.S.A.

Even in the land of opportunity, workers are also vulnerable to human rights abuses. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, roughly two-thirds of clothing factories in both Los Angeles and New York systematically violate minimum wage and overtime laws. Unregistered sweatshops in Los Angeles and San Francisco have produced clothing sold by J. Crew, bebe, Montgomery Ward's, and a host of other retailers. Even American Apparel, a company that aggressively markets a sweat-free, worker-friendly image, has been accused of skimping on employee benefits and making it difficult for workers to unionize.




http://www.alternet.org/wiretap/23867/

[pocket]

1. and roll around in pachouli

Just dont let Eric Cartman catch you.

[Pystoff]

2. Dirty hippies

Now if I could find a pic of the Dirty Hippie from Futurama hehe.

[laststeamtrain]

3. Here's my blog profile pic--it's actually a fairly good likeness...

just spell the blog name correctly..