Capital Times

Globalization Has Its Good Side, Too

Section: EDITORIAL, Page 14A
Date: Thursday, January 29, 2004

John Nichols Deysi Hernandez has experienced the bad and good of globalization. Two years ago, when the 37-year-old Salvadoran seamstress helped to organize a union at the garment factory where she worked in San Salvador, she thought she had seen the worst of it. Women worked long hours for little pay, they were denied overtime compensation, they were verbally and physically abused, and when workers became pregnant they faced discrimination.

"We were so mistreated in our workplace that at first I was afraid to get involved with the union. But finally I realized it was the only way to try to make things better," says Hernandez, who was the featured speaker Wednesday at the fourth annual Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice Clergy-Labor luncheon, and who will speak at 7 tonight at a community gathering in the Red Gym, 716 Langdon St. on the UW-Madison campus.

The union Hernandez and a group of other women formed was a pioneering initiative to better the conditions of workers in San Salvador's sprawling complex of maquiladora factories, where free trade policies allow U.S. clothing firms to contract out production of their garments to factory owners who keep costs low by paying pennies to Salvadoran workers. The organizing that this single mother of three teenage children did in the factory where she worked was seen as a threat not merely by the Taiwanese owners of that factory but by some of the most powerful clothing companies in the world.

Deysi Hernandez soon discovered the lengths to which U.S.-based clothing manufacturers would go to in order to maintain the sweatshop wages and conditions that keep their costs down. Shortly after she and her fellow garment workers registered their union, a multinational company for which her factory made clothes -- The Gap -- withdrew its orders from the plant where she had worked for three years. The company that owned the plant then tried to shutter the factory and move the machines she and her fellow workers used to another country.

With the help of union leaders in Salvador, Hernandez and her fellow workers got the Salvadoran government to prevent the exporting of the machines. But they were still out of work. And Hernandez soon found that her name was on a blacklist of workers with union sympathies who were denied work at maquiladora factories that produced goods not just for The Gap but for other companies, including Lands' End, the Wisconsin-based clothing firm that is now owned by Sears.

But remember, this is a story about both the bad and the good of globalization.

The good side is this: Just as corporations are going global, so too is the fight for economic justice. The story of the struggle of Hernandez and her fellow workers at the Tainan Enterprises factory quickly came to the attention of activists with the Student Labor Action Coalition, United Students Against Sweatshops, the Madison-based U.S.-Salvador Sister City network and other groups that seek to end sweatshop abuses by U.S. companies.

The Student Labor Action Coalition, which has long been active at UW-Madison, has pushed the UW and other universities to end licensing agreements with Lands' End unless the firm rejected blacklisting and started contracting with Just Garments, a successor to Tainan Enterprises that has promised to recognize the union and guarantee better pay and working conditions.

* The pressure from student and community groups has had an impact. Lands' End representatives are in San Salvador for negotiations with Just Garments, and Hernandez hopes to be able to announce tonight that an contracting agreement will be reached.

"If that happens, our factory will reopen and we will be able to return to work -- and to do so with dignity," she says. "It will be only a first step toward justice, but it will be a first step made because the people of Wisconsin supported our struggle."

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