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Date Published: 22/05/2001
Author: Anita Roddick Anita Roddick’s visit to Nicaragua told a harsh story about the realities of globalisation for the poor. |
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if you’re a flexible, forward-looking multinational company looking for a manufacturing base with no ties or commitments (complete with compliant workforce, of course) you don’t have to look far. These days, in fact, a quick trawl of the Internet can solve your location problems in one go. Type ‘Free Trade’ into any search engine, and up comes a tempting menu of global fare for the profit-hungry.
Of primary concern to Nicaraguan lawmakers is the 60 per cent rate of unemployment. Because of this, free zone operators enjoy laws that provide them with maximum freedom and benefits. ‘For ease of operation and profitability, Nicaragua is your best alternative.’
To your average multinational manufacturer, Nicaragua’s Las Mercedes Free Trade Zone must seem like heaven on Earth. But when I visited it early one morning in February it looked more like hell, as an amorphous mass of over 20,000 souls (mostly young women) poured into its featureless, prefabricated factories. Six days a week, 10 hours a day, the workers of the Free Trade Zone are making jeans, shorts and shirts in the vast Taiwanese, Korean, and US owned ‘Maquilla’ (from the Spanish, ‘to assemble’) factories for sale through US retailers like Kohls, Kmart, Wal-Mart, and J C Penney. The US military also sources jeans from the Maquillas, sold through its Army and Airforce Exchange Service, one of the largest retailers in the world.
There are 38 steps involved in sewing an average pair of jeans. Workers are paid according to a piece-rate system, with ‘pieces’ of the garment allocated to different workers. One woman’s allocation was to sew on the small-change front pocket and the hem on the back pockets. Her payslip showed she achieved 90 ‘pieces’ an hour – one operation every 40 seconds. Her reward came to about 20 cents for each pair of jeans, retailed in the US at $20–$30. At this mark-up, the Free Trade Zone would be more accurately termed the ‘Free Labour Zone’.
According to independent economic studies, a basic living wage in Nicaragua is $200 per month; yet these workers, even with forced overtime, make around $130 a month. Wages, as I saw when I visited workers’ homes at Tipitapa Barrio, that will buy them a place in cramped dirt-floored huts, made out of scavenged plastic waste, cardboard, wood or breeze-blocks, and by a single light bulb, with no plumbed-in sanitation. Zenayda, 24, who’d worked for five years at Chentex, one of the Taiwanese companies, before being fired for union involvement, told me what it was like to work there.
‘We worked from 7 am until 7 or 9 at night. Sometimes, when there was an urgent order, they made us work 24 hours straight. We worked weekends. They treated us like animals, or as if we were a machine. Often they wouldn’t give you permission to go to the bathroom. And they wouldn’t give us permission to go to the clinic; when we got sick we had to work sick.’
With 60 per cent unemployment, perhaps beggars can’t be choosers. The harsh reality is that these workers might even be termed the lucky ones. This is the harsh reality of globalisation for many of the world’s poorest people, exposing the truth about the fallacy of the ‘trickle-down’ effect that proponents of ‘free’ trade claim comes from the profits of companies that settle upon their countries. And often settle all too briefly. Not for nothing are the Free Trade companies called ‘swallows’ in Central America – all the time they are threatening to flit off to more profitable climes offering cheaper labour, and more tempting concessions at a moment’s notice.
There are other choices. Companies should be seeking to secure the best conditions and pay locally, to build a long-term relationship and commitment with and from their workforce, and contribute to developing a sustainable, long-term local economy. And governments instead of pimping their people to unscrupulous predators should only encourage companies who commit to raising the quality of life of their citizens. Utopian poppycock? Commercial suicide? I don’t think so.
For my trip to Nicaragua had two purposes; to visit the Free Trade Zones, and see the worst that modern business has to offer; and to see the other side too. I also visited a co-operative of sesame seed farmers in the north-west of Nicaragua who community-trade with my company, The Body Shop. From a tentative two tonnes in 1993, the co-op now supplies 72 tonnes of sesame oil, an essential ingredient in many of our products worldwide. The community trade project began when the farmers approached us after world market prices for sesame seed plummeted from $35 to $18 per hundredweight. The deal’s guaranteed price and long-term partnership has enabled the co-op farmers to plan and diversify. As well as supporting the farmers, the co-op runs an agricultural merchant’s, has built a school and supports a natural health clinic.
The Body Shop is by no means the only company supporting such a model – and neither should it be. The point is that alternatives to forced labour, sweatshops and the iniquities of the global economy are already in practice; they are workable. They are real alternatives, and we need more of them – fast.
Anita Roddick is the founder of The Body Shop. For more information on Free Trade Zones and the situation in Nicaragua contact The National Labour Committee. www.nlcnet.org
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