Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: Sad fate of two ladies

Tuesday, March 21, 2000 | 9:24 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

During the late 1980s, this column expressed concern about the large manufacturing facilities in Central America making expensive clothes and shoes for U.S. markets. One day when shopping in a small store for an orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, I asked to see where the goods were made. A curtain was pulled back, and the entrance to a large warehouse-style building exposed dozens of sewing machines manned by old women and teenagers. None of them were making as much as 50 cents an hour.

Coming from that building were clothes that carry the most expensive tags to the shops along the Las Vegas Strip and the fashion centers of Beverly Hills. Someplace between those hot and sweaty shops somebody was making millions of dollars. At the same time, the U.S. Agency for International Development was paying for advertisements encouraging our industries to relocate in the countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Yes, AID was spending tax dollars for these advertisements. Your tax dollars were being used to encourage the relocation of American jobs to other countries where workers would perform for little money under terrible conditions.

Some Americans have made note of these problems, and the students at Duke University have led the way in making certain their college stores don't sell items made in foreign sweatshops. Last fall in Seattle, large numbers of people showed their displeasure with the promotion of the World Trade Organization. There is good cause to believe the WTO is good for international corporations but will become just another load on the shoulders of the workers of the world. Certainly the North American Free Trade Agreement hasn't been a leap forward for the workers on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The most impressive explanation of some of the burdens carried by workers is revealed by writer William M. Adler in the March/April issue of Mother Jones magazine.

Adler follows the job Mollie James of Paterson, N.J., lost to Balbina Duque now living in Matamoros, Mexico, on the U.S. border. It didn't take place overnight but Mollie, after more than 30 years with Universal Manufacturing Co., watched the company become MagneTek, and many jobs moved from Paterson to Mississippi and Arkansas. In the South the company paid 75 cents an hour less than the $7.91 Mollie earned in New Jersey. This still wasn't good enough for the greedy company so in 1989 it moved on to Matamoros where people work for less than $8 a day.

It's in Matamoros where the writer picks up Balbina in 1993 working for MagneTek. Let Adler tell you about her life: "But the basic needs ... are unmet, and the evidence is as obvious and irrefutable as the colonia in MagneTek's back yard, where Balbina and her neighbors wrestle every single day with ferociously difficult decisions: Should I work overtime or huddle with my children to keep them warm? Buy meat or medicine? Pay the light bill or the gas bill? She makes those decisions based on a daily salary of 58 pesos, the equivalent of $7.43. That's an hourly wage of 92 cents -- roughly the same starting wage Mollie James earned nearly half a century before. And Balbina often makes those decisions after working a grueling double shift -- from 3:30 in the afternoon until 6 the following morning, after which she arrives home in time to fix breakfast for her children, accompany her oldest to school, and squeeze in a few hours of sleep before heading back to the plant in the afternoon."

Now back to Mollie James in New Jersey:

"Mollie James never again found full-time work. She received a severance payment, after taxes, of $3,171.66 -- about $93 for each of the 34 years she worked. She collected unemployment benefits for six months and then enrolled in a computer-repair school, receiving a certificate of completion and numerous don't-call-us responses to job inquiries. Late last year, at the age of 68, she took a part-time job as an attendant at a nursing home. For the remainder of her income, she depends on Social Security and the rent she collects from the three-family house she owns, as well as a monthly pension of $71.23 from her Teamsters local. "That's nothing," she says. "That doesn't even pay your telephone bill. It's gone before you know it."

This isn't a pretty picture for millions of prosperous Americans to see, but it's one that we shouldn't be allowed to avoid or deny. Are we earning good salaries to purchase items made available by people who must live and sweat like slaves? By not facing the truth about these conditions have we become willing participants?

The student body leaders of Duke University and other people with social consciences would answer both questions with YES and are doing something about it.