Guest Column
By: Anne Sweeney
The image of the Third World sweatshop dies hard.
From South America to the Pacific Rim, the picture of the dark, satanic mills of the 21st century informs the media and the message of protesters of globalization.
Women and children work for subsistence wages churning out athletic shoes, sportswear and designer knock-offs. Five-year-olds tie knots in carpets instead of learning to read and write.
Celebrities are castigated when it’s found that it takes an overworked village to create their clothing lines.
But manufacturers, sensitive to these criticisms and the negative publicity they generate, are taking steps to improve conditions.
More significantly, several multi-national companies such as Timberland have forged innovative programs that help factory owners in developing countries to set new standards of safety, ethics and fair labor practices. In the process, they work with relief agencies such as CARE International to create work environments that are just, safe and ultimately, productive.
Our group of CARE donors observed CARE’s Factory Health Education Projects in Vietnam and Cambodia. CARE provides clinical services for garment factory workers and promotes education, awareness and prevention of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Companies such as The Gap and Timberland are partners with CARE in these projects.
In southeast Asia, uneducated young women from the countryside make up the bulk of the manufacturing workforce. In meeting their needs, CARE must cope with issues of dire poverty, violence, drug abuse, political corruption, entrenched gender discrimination and cultural attitudes as well as a fiendish sex industry that thrives because of all of these elements.
Girls come to the cities from remote and impoverished rural communities. They have little schooling. It is the male children who stay in school while the girls are set to work farming, caring for siblings and eventually off to the cities for factory work that can pay from $40 to $70 per month.
They are pressured to send money home, and the enticement of easy money and easeful drugs in the sex industry is a major problem, especially in Cambodia. Most live in dormitories and work a six-day week. Culturally, they are urged to be passive and unassertive. They are lonely, vulnerable and often unable to deal with the complexities of city life.
CARE offers them a range of life skills training as well as financial planning and savings programs, occupational health and safety improvements and reproductive health education that stresses prevention. Classes in HIV prevention are conducted by peer counselors as well as CARE staff. Most important, these programs are empowering, designed to raise awareness among these young women of their rights as workers, citizens, women and human beings.
Our first stop is a factory set in an industrial park outside of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). The facility could be in New Jersey except for the tropical trees and flowers that bloom on the green lawns. The factory produces athletic shoes for major brands.
The facility is clean, well-lighted and comfortable. The machinery is modern and, we are told, operated under firm safety standards. The managers are young Taiwanese Chinese. Since Vietnam instituted its policy of Doi Moi change and newness the Communist economic model has been restructured, although critics complain that the government retains too much control over private enterprise.
But foreign investment is encouraged, and overseas companies have brought progressive management theories and advanced technology to southeast Asia. These managers recognize that a healthy, educated workforce is a productive one and that the CARE programs can help maintain physical and emotional well-being.
We tour a similar plant in Phnom Penh, one of 26 factories in Cambodia where CARE maintains in-house educational and health programs for young female employees. A Malaysia-based company operates this factory that produces sportswear and licensed merchandise that includes New York Yankee shirts and caps.
The plant’s human resources manager is an earnest Cambodian gentleman who is working to bring Western labor practices to the factory. Its polices exceed what is required by Cambodian law. Workers get 18 days annual paid vacation, maternity and sick leave and triple overtime on holidays. The plant is unionized another step in empowering the workers. Dues are 25 cents a month.
Because war and genocide decimated a generation of Vietnamese and Cambodians, these populations are predominately under 18.
In Cambodia, CARE seeks to change attitudes that are deeply distrustful of government, authority and outside influence. The vicious class warfare, isolation and economic devastation caused by the Khmer Rouge are just 25 years past and its impact still felt. Consequently, improving communications between the workers and management is a crucial part of CARE’s initiative. The long-term objective is to have these programs eventually operated by the factory management.
CARE operates a wide range reproductive health and HIV prevention programs in both countries, designed to change community attitudes by stressing the rights of women, not just in the workplace but throughout society. Staffers are keenly aware that this involves inspiring young men to take responsibility for social change.
But the most fundamental changes will come about only if young women are educated and empowered. CARE sees these workplace programs and girls’ educational initiatives as the key to slower population growth, reduced child mortality, higher incomes, reduced HIV transmission, greater influence for women, reduced trafficking of children and increased respect for human rights.
Anne Sweeney visited factories in Vietnam and Cambodia as part of a donor trip organized by CARE International for members of World Wings International Inc., the social and philanthropic organization of former flight attendants of Pan American World Airways. The group supports CARE’s programs for women and children in developing countries. Ms. Sweeney is president of the Princeton/Philadelphia Chapter of World Wings International.