Reply #23: "are...........shopping for voters" [View All]

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One thing I have noticed is that some idealogical Republicans say making money on because some is forced to work for lower wage is okay. Then when one goes higher on the corporate-republican food chain it goes making money is all there is

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/03/EDGT42MT171.DTL&type=printable
Shopping for voters
Ruth Rosen
Monday, November 3, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/03/EDGT42MT171.DTL


IMAGINE THAT you earn $8 an hour working for Wal-Mart. Then, you learn that the store is recruiting workers, at $10 an hour, to convince neighbors and shoppers to vote against a law that would limit the size of "big- box'' stores in unincorporated areas of Contra Costa County.

Great, you think. I'll apply. But Wal-Mart won't hire its own workers because the corporation isn't sure it's legal to use them to promote a political campaign.

When you realize that Wal-Mart will pay higher wages to those campaigning to keep your wages low, you get angry -- which is how I've learned about the Arkansas retailer's countywide plans to repeal the ordinance.

Last June, the Contra Costa Country Board of Supervisors passed the ban when it recognized that Wal-Mart's seductive low prices come with hidden costs to residents. The retailer's subsistence wages drive down the pay of other workers; its huge super-centers undermine local small businesses and create more traffic congestion. Taxpayers, moreover, end up paying for workers' health care because they can't afford costly benefits on such low pay.
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But if they work in police-prison states like China or Nicaragua, they don't have to worry about the voting public

http://www.aflcio.org/aboutaflcio/magazine/walmart.cfm


Not made in USA: Family members hand food to workers at the Chentex plant in Nicaragua, where workers are locked behind enclosures throughout their workday.

The NLC found and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported last year that in Managua, Nicaragua, Wal-Mart has been among retailers using the Chentex sweatshop to manufacture private-label goods. While Wal-Mart says it has a code of conduct guaranteeing workers' rights for anyone sewing Wal-Mart garments around the world, Chentex's Taiwanese owners fired in 2000 union leaders asking for raises for workers making less than $5.30 a day for a 10-hour day, or less than 53 cents an hour.

With President George W. Bush promising on the campaign trail to "look South" and Congress last year enacting the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act, which extends to Caribbean and Central American nations no-tariff benefits similar to those under the North American Free Trade Agreement, this region is poised for an explosion of garment sweatshops, says Clark University's Ross. Central America is extremely convenient for retailers and it offers lower shipping costs than Asia.

But the region also is where union leaders, often women, routinely are threatened by employers, according to the Support Team International for Textileras, a network of women community and union organizers. Only such factory clients as Wal-Mart and the Bush administration, which the Walton family backed with huge campaign donations, can ensure workers are protected, Ross adds. (In the 2000 election cycle, Republican Party committees received $100,000 from John Walton, $81,000 from Jim Walton and $10,000 from Alice Walton, the children of the deceased Sam Walton, while reaping another $75,000 from the company and $384,000 from other board members, according to Federal Election Commission filings.)

"With Caribbean Basin parity," Ross says, "the danger is that by using China as a whip, labor standards in Mexico and Central America will be driven even further down by sweatshop owners competing with business from the big private-label retailers led by Wal-Mart."
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