$3 Million for Super Bowl Ad. $3 for Workers Who Paid For It

[Joanne98]

Nearly 100 million football fans across the country will be tuning in to watch Bruce Springsteen belt out his trademark songs celebrating America’s workers during halftime at the Super Bowl this evening. They also will see two new 30-second commercials—estimated to cost at least $3 million each—from Bridgestone Firestone, the world’s largest tire company and the halftime sponsor.

But none of the viewers will see Austin Natee and his fellow workers. Natee is president of the union that represents the thousands of Liberian rubber workers who earn $3 on a good day, but whose hard labor creates the profits that Bridgestone Firestone uses to pay for the halftime spectacular.

When he was in Washington, D.C., last year to accept the 2007 Meany-Kirkland Human Rights Award on behalf of the rubber workers, Natee explained how Bridgestone Firestone continually exploits workers and pollutes the environment. Saying the workers live in modern-day slavery, he explained that rubber tappers work 14 hours a day and must tap 750 rubber trees and accumulate 150 pounds of latex daily—all for little more than $3 a day and a monthly 100-pound bag of subsidized rice if quotas are met.


Tappers walk for miles with more than 140 pounds of rubber in metal buckets on their backs, Natee says, and the company fails to provide them with basic safety equipment such as goggles to prevent the latex from dripping into their eyes and blinding them.

http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/02/01/3-million-for-super-bowl-ad-3-for-workers-who-paid-for-it/#more-9837

[geardaddy]

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