Vision: How One Tiny Factory Is Challenging the Sweatshop Norm

In the 1990s and early 2000s, exposing sweatshop conditions in garment factories was the student activist cause du jour--but more than a fad, it was a lasting, hard-hitting movement that permeated into the mainstream. Activists spread the truth that workers in foreign factories who make our clothes, toys and sneakers are paid a pittance, subject to abuse and union-busting, and sometimes even live under slave-like conditions such as being locked in their factories.

Students, labor organizers and union members marched side by side, leafleting in front of Niketowns and Disney stores, occupying college administration buildings and urging passersby to be wary consumers of big-name brands. For several years when I was in high school and college, I enthusiastically participated in all those activities as part of this movement, along with many of my peers and friends. Everyone knew the chant: “What’s the Gap Got to Hide? Sweatshop Made, Sold Inside.”

Members of United Students Against Sweatshops turned their organization into the powerhouse student labor activist group. For years, they brought administrators at schools from the Ivy League to dozens of state schools, as well as corporate megaliths such as Russell Athletic to the negotiating table to convince them to rehire workers and pay them living wages. But now they are also singing a different tune, something along the lines of: “Buy These Clothes! (Just Not Those).”

“For the first time, I can wear my Badger sweatshirt knowing it was made in just working conditions,” wrote Jonah Zinn, a University of Wisconsin student and USAS organizer, a few days ago.

That’s because of a revolutionary new factory in the Domincan Republic, started by one of the most conscience-minded college apparel suppliers, Knights Apparel, as a model and a test case of what can happen when wages are “living” and union organizing is allowed. According to a 2008 New York Times feature on the factory, Knights Apparel CEO Joseph Bozich was already known for complying with the Workers Rights Consortium, the most labor-friendly and stringent monitor of working conditions, but he wanted to do something even more.

Alta Gracia (“high grace”), named for neighboring town Villa Altagracia, was built in the space once occupied by a far more typical clothing factory, a Korean cap factory called BJ&B, whose workers suffered under grueling sweatshop conditions.

“Before there was a union there was abuse, both physical and verbal,” Martiza Vargas, a union leader at the old and new factory told AlterNet through a translator over the phone. “When I say that, I mean obscene words, pushing workers. On one occasion they slapped a worker so hard she literally fell out of her seat. One of the managers kicked one of the chairs under one of the employees and she fell.

“It was totally prohibited to even talk about unions,” Vargas said. “On two occasions they fired workers for even just talking about a union inside the factory.”

Still, Vargas and her tenacious fellow workers--with the help of the international labor community--persevered over the six years she worked at BJ&B and formed a union. She says then “things were able to change a little bit.” The harassment and abuse stopped and the group of workers made tiny inroads in terms of salary and small improvements in working conditions. Still, the money they made was “nowhere near a dignified salary that we really needed to live and cover our basic needs,” she says. In fact, many families remained separated because parents did not have the money to provide for their children.

And then one day they woke up to find the company was leaving--moving to a country with cheaper labor and less protection for workers in the endless capitalist race to the bottom. Thanks to unionization, the workers at the factory gained severance pay, but when that ran out, there was nothing for them in Vlla Altagracia and many had to leave town or even the country to find work. “It was like that until the Alta Gracia factory opened in Altagracia,” says Vargas.