AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.

While thousands gather at the Lincoln Memorial to stand for children, one issue that’s sure not to receive much attention is the impact of the global economy on children here and in the developing world. Pacifica discovered that some of the T-shirts for the Stand for Children event were assembled in El Salvador by The Limited, one of CDF’s major funders. We tried to find out under what kind of conditions and if child labor was used, but couldn’t get answers by showtime today. By the way, the Children’s Defense Fund is offering Stand for Children T-shirts in adult sizes only. Maybe that was just a little oversight.

Television host Kathie Lee Gifford has come under fire in recent weeks when Charlie Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee revealed that clothing being produced under her name for Walmart was being manufactured in Honduran sweatshops by child labor. Kathie Lee has denied the accusation, even going so far as to cry on TV. But this week, Kernaghan brought Wendy Diaz to Washington. Diaz, a Honduran girl who’s now 15, began working at Global Fashions when she was 13. Global Fashions is a Korean-owned plant that produces clothing for U.S. companies. Her story is a perfect example of how globalization of the economy affects children in poor nations. Her story is translated by Barbara Briggs.

WENDY DIAZ: [translated] My name is Wendy Diaz. I’m from Honduras. I’m 15 years old, and I entered into Global Fashion to work when I was 13. And last year, until December, I was working on pants for Kathie Lee.

In Global Fashion, there are many minors working, like me, who are 13, 14, 15 years old, and even 12-year-olds. And they’re working on the pants for Kathie Lee there. They make us work until 7:00 or 9:00 at night, and we work on Saturdays until 12:00 or until 5:00 in the afternoon. Sometimes they keep us working all night until 6:30 in the morning. And this happened frequently with the Kathie Lee pants. And the workers in packing almost always work these shifts.

Working those hours, I earned 240 lempiras a week, which they’ve told me is $21.86 a week. My wage was 3.34, which is 31 cents, 31 U.S. cents, an hour. Nobody can survive on that wage.

The treatment in Global Fashion is very bad, and the Koreans insult us and demand that we work very fast. Sometimes they throw the clothing in our face. They push us, and they hurt us a lot. With the Kathie Lee pants, we had a production goal of 800 pairs of pants a day. And they demanded that we complete that production goal, and if we were able to complete it, then they’d increase the goal the next day by 50 more pairs of pants.

In Global Fashion, the plant, it’s very hot. It’s almost like an oven. They don’t let us go to the bathroom. They keep it locked all day. And we can only go twice a day. And they don’t allow us to talk. And if they find us talking, then they give us an eight-day suspension with no wage.

And they even maltreat the pregnant women a lot. They send them to the packing department, and they put them — they give them the job of pressing. There, they have to work 12 or 13 hours a day on their feet, and their feet swell up. And that’s what they do to make these workers quit, and then the company doesn’t pay their complete wages or their severance pay.

And the Koreans like to touch the young girls. They like to touch us a lot. Maybe as if they’re playing, they touch our legs or our buttocks. Many of us would like to go to night school, but we can’t. And we don’t have medical insurance, and we also have to pay for medicines.

North Americans from companies from the U.S. have come to visit Global Fashions many times, but they’ve never talked with any worker. All of us workers at Global Fashion are very young. The majority of us are young women, 13 up to 23 years old. And I suppose that the Koreans don’t hire older people because they would not accept all the abuses.

And the majority of us are afraid. The time that we met with Barbara and Charlie, afterward, the company threatened us, and they were saying — they said that they might fire all of us. Also, the manager called a meeting of all the workers inside the plant and said that he wasn’t going to accept any union in the plant, and if somebody tried to organize, that he was going to fire them immediately. The company hires spies so to inform them of everything that we do when we’re trying to organize. When we had a group of 40 of us who wanted to organize, the company found out, and they began to fire our compañeros. And they harassed others, so that we had to quit when we couldn’t bear it anymore. More than 50 workers were fired because we wanted to organize.

When we leave work at 9:00 at night, it’s very dangerous, and we have to go out in groups. And we go to our houses almost running, because there’s a lot of crime, and there’s no transport.

I’m an orphan, and I live with an aunt, and we live in a small house where there are 11 of us. And I have to work to help my brothers. Right now we’re in production. We’re producing Eddie Bauer and J.Crew. And there are still a lot of minors working in the factory. We want to work because, really, we need to, but we also want them to give us permission so we can attend night school. Really, I’d like to talk with Kathie Lee to ask her to help us to put an end to all this maltreatment, so that they’d stop screaming at us and hitting us, and that they’d allow us to go to night school and to organize to defend our rights. And we want Kathie Lee to return her work to the factory, but with better conditions and a just
wage.

AMY GOODMAN: Fifteen-year-old Wendy Diaz, speaking at a press conference on Capitol Hill this week.

REV. DAVID DYSON: My name is David Dyson. I’m a Presbyterian minister from Brooklyn, New York, and involved in the People of Faith Network.

The other night on television, this picture was shown to Ms. Gifford. It is a picture of some of the young women who work on her clothing. And she dismissed it by saying this could be a picture of anybody. We know now that it’s not just a picture of anybody. This is Wendy Diaz in the middle of some of her fellow workers. Prior to this, Ms. Gifford dismissed those in the human rights community working on these issues as “nobodies.” And I’d just like to say that Wendy Diaz is not just anybody. She’s not just a nobody. She’s a somebody. She’s a child of God who has just as much right to a decent life and decent working conditions as Ms. Gifford’s children have.

What may be apparent to you is the danger that Wendy is in after she comes to the United States, makes these appearances and returns home. She may never work again in the garment industry. She may never work again, period, due to a very sophisticated system of blacklisting in those countries.

The People of Faith Network, which is a group of religious congregations in the United States which are becoming increasingly active on issues of economic justice, are going to be working together with the National Labor Committee to try to put together some kind of a scholarship fund for Wendy, so that when she goes back, she has the opportunity to go to school, just like my daughter did when she was 15 years old.

Also, I think it’s important to say that it’s not enough for companies like Walmart to just keep cutting and running from situation to situation until we can catch up with them and expose another situation. Companies like Walmart need to go back to Honduras and clean up those plants where they subcontract, and demand that those companies live up to even their own corporate codes and the laws in those countries.

So, speaking as a member of the religious community, I’m confident that the religious community in this country is going to become more and more active in this campaign. Nobody wants to go into their kids’ closets and see clothes that are made by other kids and under these conditions. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: David Dyson, Presbyterian minister with the People of Faith Network here in New York. This week’s press conference was held by California Democrat George Miller, who’s pushing his colleagues in Congress to act to stop the exploitation of child labor.

REP. GEORGE MILLER: The story that we have heard here this morning is one that has, unfortunately, been told by young children around the world, and all too often implicating American manufacturers, designers, contractors and celebrities. But the time has come for — so that parents will have a right to know that the toys and the garments that they buy their children were not made by other exploited children, and that men and women who buy designer clothes or other clothing will know that the manufacturer is not hiding behind the good name of some celebrity like Kathie Lee Gifford or others in making those clothes with exploited labor and child labor.

The fact is that despite laws against the use of child labor and laws protecting the minimum wage, labor exploitation is rampant, both domestically and abroad. We have a situation where celebrities hide behind retailers, retailers hide behind contractors, and contractors hide behind subcontractors. Apparently, nobody is responsible for the exploitation of children, for the exploitation of women and others in the workforce, and yet somehow this exploitation continues to take place.

The fact is that this is a problem that must be solved at the top. This is a problem that celebrities who loan their names, retailers who invest hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising, and contractors who work for those retailers must put an end to the process of the exploitation of children and the exploitation of others in the workforce.

In an economy of consumer products, where we know if tuna is dolphin-safe, we know if pajamas are flame-retardant, we know if an automobile gets so many miles per gallon, we know if a commodity is made of cotton or synthetic, somehow we are unable to tell the American consumer whether or not it is free of child labor, of child exploitation, of child abuse and the abuse of others in the workplace. This can no longer continue.

And what I am asking is — today, is that the U.S. companies will voluntarily adopt a simple label on products sold in the United States. That label is “no sweat.” That is a label that will represent to the American consumers, with the backing of the manufacturer, the backing of the retailer, that this product with this label sewn into it or put on it was not made with child labor or exploited labor. It’s a very straightforward representation, but apparently a very difficult representation to get from manufacturers and retailers today.

They all tell us that they have agreements with their contractors, with their subcontractors, not to use child labor, not to use exploited labor, but then they quickly tell you that they have no ability to police those agreements, they don’t know everything that is going on. And that leads us back to Wendy Diaz, because that leads us back to a situation depending upon what plant, in what country, under what conditions, is sewing a particular batch of clothing, assembling a particular toy or assembling a particular line of clothing. You may or may not be buying a product that has used child labor in the manufacture.

These companies that are so rich, these companies that have done so well in the American marketplace, owe it to the American consumer. They owe it to the American consumer to once and for all declare that their clothes have no sweat, no sweat of children and no sweat of exploited workers. If these companies fail to do this, if they fail to take the voluntary action that they can control — and, mind you, we’re talking about companies, we’re talking about celebrities that are monsters in this field. They dictate the outcome. Michael Jordan, Kathie Lee Gifford, Walmart, Kmart, Federated Stores, The Gap, Levi Strauss, some of these companies have taken that step. But when they set the standards, the standards will be adhered to.

And we think what we have seen, what we have seen evolve here, is that people who are unintentionally caught up in this, because representations are made to them, people did not know about it, but no longer can claim that. And what we’re saying is that this voluntary action should be taking place.

If that’s not the case, then I think the Congress is going to have to step in, because the American marketplace cannot be used as an outlet center for exploited child labor and exploited labor generally. Then we have to look to legislation offered by my friend, Congressman Moran, that deals with the banning of importation of goods, which deals with the question of concessionary loans and foreign assistance to companies that continue to allow children to be exploited. Congressman Moran and Congressman Frank have dealt with this kind of — this kind of legislation.

And finally, the label has to carry with it the representation and the assurance to the American public that independent, random, unannounced inspections are made, because no longer can the manufacturers and retailers continue to hide behind the lame excuse that somehow they didn’t know what that particular subcontractor was doing on that particular day.

If we do that, we have the opportunity to free these children, such as Wendy Diaz, to go to school, to pursue an education, to pursue a childhood with the understanding that they will be protected in the workplace, they will be protected in the marketplace. This is not something that the manufacturers and the retailers can avoid.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressman George Miller, Democrat of California.

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AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now! is produced by Julie Drizin, with help from Pat Greenfield and Pat Egan. Thanks to Ellin O’Leary and the folks at Youth Radio in Berkeley. Our engineer is Matthew Finch; our director, Errol Maitland. Special thanks to Graceon Challenger, Paul Wonder, Samori Marksman, Valerie van Isler and the whole crew at Pacifica station WBAI here in New York, where we’ve been broadcasting for the last two weeks. Monday, we’ll be back in Washington bringing you highlights of the Stand for Children rally. If you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can call the Pacifica Archives at 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening to this special edition of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!