HANES - CHAMPION www.hanes.com - Sara Lee (the Chicago-based owner of Hanes, Leggs, and other clothing brands); Sara Lee Branded Apparel Companies produces university-licensed Champion and Hanes sweatshop-clothing that is being sold in the New Mexico State University Bookstore. Sara Lee is one of the most notorious sweatshop contractors in the world. Sara Lee uses subpar monitoring activities to keep track of the oppression of mostly women working in its subcontract sweatshops, that sew university logos, including the NMSU logo on to garments sold on university campuses.
Sara Lee Corporation is an old-style conglomerate that encompasses not only its frozen-food namesake but also such "unintegrated" brands as Hanes underwear, Wonderbra, Coach leather goods, Champion sports apparel, Kiwi shoe polish and Ball Park Franks" (Naomi Klein, No Logo Book, 2000).
The salary of the CEO of Sara Lee, manufacturer of sportswear labels Champion and Hanes, is nearly $7 million a year. The average salary of a Sara Lee sweatshop worker is 33 cents an hour.
It has taken wide-spread university and community organizing efforts to persuade Sara Lee to cease and desist from using slave labor to make its products in Burma. Burma has slave labor camps, that until recently contracted production to Sara Lee.
ACTION: Can New Mexico State University use its purchasing power to demand that Sara Lee and its Champion/Hanes sweatshops upgrade the quality of their monitoring activities to include full disclosure of all factory locations, a living wage for sweatshop workers, and allow workers the right to organize so that these workers have a voice and some local control over their working conditions? If Sara Lee refuses to upgrade monitoring and conditions, then perhaps it is time to look for an alternate supplier.
Below are examples of Sara Lee sweatshop behaviors, and how various organizing efforts have either succeeded or failed to bring about meaningful change in monitoring practices and working conditions.
SARA LEE AND SLAVE LABOR
http://www.behindthelabel.org/headlines.php?story_id=43
Sara Lee Vows No More Business in Burma WASHINGTON, DC--Sara Lee, a
top seller of intimate apparel in the United
States with nearly $17.5 billion dollars in annual revenues and owner
of Hanes, Hanes Her Way, Leggs, and Just My Size brands announced on
Friday it will cease allowing production of its garments in Burma.
Sara Lee`s move follows a string of recent decisions by 15 other
U.S.-based corporations to forbid importing goods from Burma or such
goods to be sold in retail stores, including Wal-Mart and Costco.
... A coalition of U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations and labor unions, including FBC, Global Exchange, Rainforest Action Network, and the Lawyer`s Committee for Human Rights, have called on U.S. corporations to stop importing from Burma in response to evidence from the International Labour Organisation (a United Nations agency) that the country`s military regime is responsible for horrific human rights abuses, including "a modern form of slave labor."
SARA LEE - HOW IT DEALS WITH WAGE INCREASE, BUT HAVE BIGGER DAILY QUOTA AND WAGE-CHEATING INCREASE.
THE U.S. IN HAITI How to Get Rich on 11 Cents an Hour A Report
Prepared for The National Labor Committee
January, 1996 http://www.nlcnet.org/Haiti11.htm
Raising Wages form 28 to 30 cents an hour, so Hanes ups the quotas.
When President Aristide increased the minimum wage effective May 4,
1995, many companies simply increased the production quota in order to
avoid having to pay the increased labor costs. As is the rule in
Haiti, if workers cannot make the quota they are paid only a fraction
of the minimum wage. At Excel Apparel Exports, jointly owned and
operated with Kellwood Co., quotas have been increased by 133% since
the passage of the new minimum wage law. Excel Apparel produces
women's panties for the Hanes division of Sara Lee Corp., under the
"Hanes Her Way" label. The panties are sold at Wal-Mart and
smaller retailers.
SARA LEE - WHEN A LABOR-RELIGIOUS COALITION FINDS PROBLEMS WITH HANES/CHAMPION IN MEXICO, SARA LEE JUST MOVES THE SWEATSHOP TO INDONESIA.
http://www.cfcrochester.org/spr/archive/fall00.shtml Office of Social Policy Research 2000
Labor-Religion Coalition
The New York State Labor-Religion Coalition sponsors tours of
sweatshop worker neighborhoods in Mexico, a
stone's throw away from Brownsville, Texas. Last November's delegation
got a rare chance to tour a
sweatshop facility that had made garments for Hanes and other familiar
companies. The factory closed on a
Friday afternoon, and with no notice to the employees, no severance
pay, and no payment for the final week's work, moved its operations to
Indonesia.
SARA LEE - WHEN UNION ORGANIZES, SARA LEE SHUTS DOWN THE FACTORY
AND REOPENS IT DOWN THE ROAD.
http://www.witnessforpeace.org/rockymountain/GuatemalaPhotoEssay.htm
A sweatshop on the outskirts of Guatemala. Guatemalan clothing factories like this one produce clothes for such brands as Philips Van Heusen, Liz Claiborne, Hanes, and War Athletic. The first union shop in Guatemala closed without notice, against the union contract. The owners claimed to have lost the client, but really moved the work to other, non-union factories.
SARA LEE- NOTRE DAME TASK FORCE INVESTIGATES SARA LEE/CHAMPION SWEATSHOP WEAR WORN BY IRISH TEAMS AND SOLD IN THEIR BOOKSTORE
Notre Dame magazine home page http://www.nd.edu/~ndmag/news2s99.htm
Summer 1999 issue
.
Organization Hired to Police Anti-sweatshop Code
Members of the task-force include the president of the student body, a representative from the Center for Social Concerns, faculty members, and three licensee representatives: the president of the Higher Education Group of Follett Corporation (which manages the Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore), the general counsel to Adidas (supplier of footwear to Notre Dame teams) and the director of Global Workplace Values and Safety at Sara Lee/Champion (which supplies outerwear to Irish teams).
Columbia University News Feb. 29, 2000 http://www.columbia.edu/cu/pr/00/02/apparel.html
Columbia Apparel Licensees Agree To Monitoring, Factory Disclos
Recent Developments
In February Columbia's two largest licensees, Champion Products and
Jostens Inc. signed the Code of Workplace Conduct of the Fair Labor
Association (the FLA is a monitoring and enforcement organization
comprised of more than 130 colleges and universities, businesses, and
not-for-profits, including Columbia). These companies have also
provided full factory disclosure, a requirement that goes beyond the
FLA Code but that Columbia insisted on months ago. Both of these
developments occurred after extensive dialogue between the companies
and Columbia's Office of Business Services.
... When the deadlines came and certain licensees had not responded, OBS chose to push harder, in the hope of bringing these licensees on board and into the culture of compliance. In addition OBS opened a more extensive dialogue with key executives at our two largest licensees, Champion Products (a subsidiary of Sara Lee Branded Apparel) and Jostens, Inc. our key resource for college rings. Finally on February 3, 2000 Champion Products signed our Code of Workplace Conduct Commitment Form and provided full factory disclosure. Josten's followed suit on February 15, 2000.
November 18, 1998
Codes to address sweatshop labor http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=42
MICHAEL KOLBER
YDN Staff Reporter
Yale students can buy recycled paper and drink soy milk, but if
students want to ensure that their school's logo apparel is not being
made in a sweatshop they will have some difficulty....
Apparel companies said they will give lists of factories to colleges that request them under the condition that colleges do not make the lists public.
"The locations and types of plants that we have in various countries is the kind of information all companies, no matter what their product line, hold very closely for competitive reasons," said Peggy Carter, vice president of corporate affairs for Sara Lee Branded Apparel Companies, which owns Champion and Hanes.
Company spokespeople say that disclosing their factory locations to the public is unnecessary because they already have in-house mechanisms to insure their shops are operated humanely.
Ball Park Franks Fiasco: 21 Dead, $200,000 Fine by Robert Weissman http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2001/000081.html
Boycott the Sara Lee Corporation, the maker of pound cakes,
cheesecakes, pies, muffins, Bil Mar Ball Park
franks hot dogs, as well as L'Eggs, Hanes, Playtex and Wonderbra
products. Last month, Sara Lee pled guilty to two
misdemeanor counts in connectionwith a listeriosis outbreak that led
to the deaths of at least 21 consumers who ate
Ball Park Franks hot dogs and other meat products. One hundred people
were seriously injured. The company paid a
$200,000 fine after collaboration between Sara Lee and the federal
prosecutors which can be seen on Sara Lee's
web site where it has posted a "joint press release." for
the first time in American history. Link to the Corporate
Predator site.
The Global Sweatshop Economy by Arnie Alpert http://www.afsc.org/nero/nh/sweat.htm
This talk was developed for the Sidore Lecture Series at Plymouth
State College, Plymouth New Hampshire, and presented Oct. 23,
2000.
Lydia Guzman worked at the Hanes factory in Morelos, Coahuila,
Mexico. She was a member of a 10-woman team,
in which each team member was responsible for a single operation, such
as sewing a shoulder or sleeve. Lydia said
the workers would be disciplined for talking on the job, and that they
would not get paid if the machinery broke down.
Their quota was twenty dozen T-shirts per hour. Their pay ranged from
400 to 500 pesos a week, or somewhere
between a dollar and $1.40 an hour. If you do the math, this means the
workers, in total, get back about a nickel for
every T-shirt that comes off their assembly line, less than one
percent of the retail price of the shirt in a U.S. store.
Blood, sweat, and T-shirts by Damon T. DiCicco June
1999 http://students.washington.edu/ruckus/vol-2/issue-8/sweat.html
Mandatory or not, many workers must work additional hours to make
their unbelievably low salaries pay for basic
necessities. Hanes is a good example. Their shirts are made with U.S.
made components in Haiti. The average
hourly wage for garment workers in Haiti is forty-nine cents, and
Haiti is not by far the lowest paying. Indonesian
workers make a mere thirty-four cents an hour (not including bonuses).
Workers in Vietnam and India make only
twenty-six cents (also excluding bonuses). Chinese garment workers may
make as little twenty cents an hour.
Among the very worst are Burma and Bangladesh, where wages range from
ten to eighteen cents per hour, plus
bonuses.
December 15, 1998 Sweatshop Watch http://www.sweatshopwatch.org/swatch/headlines/1998/cispes_dec98.html
Christmas Firings This Year in at Least 6 Maquilas in El Salvador
Organizers in El Salvador have received numerous calls from workers
from at least six different maquilas reporting illegal firings and
non-payment of the required year-end bonus. At the Sara Lee maquila
(makers of Hanes, Hanes-Her-Way, Champion, Bali lingerie, and other
brands), located in the El Pedregal free trade zone, a number of
workers realized that they had received less than the legally
prescribed amount. Eighteen workers went to management to discuss the
discrepancy. Their questions were a result of an education /
leafleting blitz which took place on November 25 - a Stop Violence
against Women day. Organizers handed out flyers which notified women
of their rights, including the right to a Christmas bonus and how to
calculate the correct bonus amount owed to them. Sara Lee management
responded by saying that they should be thankful that they have any
job at all, and then fired them.
Amount Sara Lee (Hanes) stands to gain from NAFTA parity for CBI countries: $50 million 1997
No Sweat in Durham http://www.apparelnews.net/Archive/081800/News/newsfeat.html
Durham, N.C., has become the first city in the South to
adopt an anti-sweatshop policy. Manufacturers selling apparel
and textiles to the city now must disclose where those goods
are made and how much factory employees are paid. The city
is no longer required to make purchases on a lowest-bid
basis, and now must consider other factors, such as work
conditions at vendors' facilities.
Shareholders Focus on Genetically Modified
Foods at Sara Lee http://www.shareholderaction.org/
Resolution asks company to examine the risks and
impacts of continued use of GMOs. Annual meeting
scheduled for October.
How to Research SARA LEE http://www.clarku.edu/research/access/sociology/rossint.shtml
World Wide Web and the
government and other documents that are there for very serious
purposes rather than looking up
the weather or whatever. In the last few years, there has been a
virtual revolution in the kind of
information that has appeared on the web. For example, Mikaela and her
classmates were able
to find very detailed information about corporate and executive
compensation from Securities
and Exchange Commission documents and by doing very wide searches
through the Business
Press, which is available to us here at Clark University through a
database called Lexis/Nexis.
We discovered in the case of Jansport, which makes backpacks and
t-shirts, and Champion, both
of which are owned by very, very large corporations (Jansport by
Vanity Fair and Champion by
Sara Lee) that these are not marginal corporations. These are big
firms that are actually very
well connected to very powerful forces in the economy. They are
central players--they are not
peripheral players at all. All of this is made possible mainly through
web-based work, although
there are still some wonderful reference sources in the library that
our reference staff was very
helpful in tracking down for us.