Change in your hands
Salman Shaheen
“Instruments of a market tyranny that is extending its
reach across the planet like a cancer… feeding on life in an insatiable
quest for money” – so reads David Korten’s damning indictment of
transnational corporations in his bestselling book ‘When Corporations
Rule the World.’ Emotive though this less than favourable account of big
business’ globalising impact may be, it nonetheless points to a common
denominator to a wide range of pressing issues concerning global
poverty. Of these, perhaps none provides such a unique insight into the
seemingly callous machinations behind global capital’s inexorable march
across the globe, nor is any so abhorrent to the activists standing
opposed to it, as the problem of sweatshop labour.
Where a single
pair of Nike trainers is sold in Britain for more than the average
monthly wage of the workers in the developing world who made it, it is
not hard to see why the organisation ‘No Sweat’ describes
sweatshop labour as “modern,
global capitalism stripped bare.” Beneath the household names we see
that child labour, poverty wages, forced overtime, dangerous working
conditions, intimidation, human rights abuses, and sexual harassment of
a predominantly female workforce are well documented phenomena.
Former Honduran sweatshop worker, Lydda Eli Gonzalez,
writes “We produced more than a thousand of those shirts a day, and just
one shirt would pay more than my wage for a week!” But why are such
injustices permitted to continue? The truth is that Third World
governments welcome the economic investment of corporations such as
Nike, Gap, Disney and Wal-Mart who seek to exploit the cheap and
expendable pool of labour in these countries. The workers themselves
have little choice; the alternative is often unemployment and
starvation.
Sweatshop labour is one of the most unjust and deliberate
issues of global poverty in existence. As such, however, its
discontinuation is also amongst the most attainable of goals. Here we
can look to international youth activism.
Whether through music, poetry, art or demonstration,
young voices should be outspoken in raising awareness to the campaign to
end sweatshop labour, whilst supporting organisations such as ‘No Sweat’
to build solidarity with, unionise and empower the sweatshop workers
themselves. In an increasingly globalised world, the movement for change
must also be international.
We must use our power as consumers to promote companies
with high ethical standards and greater transparency, and publicly
pressure those lacking these to change their practices. If sufficient
numbers of young people, one of the main groups targeted by
mass-marketed sweatshop produce, were to publicly boycott these products
by writing to companies, explicitly raising their concerns, corporations
would take notice.
Martin Luther King once said that “Our lives begin to end
the day we become silent about the things that matter.” We must not be
silent. We must speak out, we must educate and we must promote empathy
and understanding so that together, a global youth can be united to end
sweatshop labour. The change is in our hands!
September 2004