(Everyone should read this series at the LA Times)
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-walmart24nov24,1,3188309.story?coll=la-home-headlines Scouring the Globe to Give Shoppers an $8.63 Polo Shirt
Wal-Mart, once a believer in buying American, extracts ever lower prices from 10,000 suppliers worldwide. Workers struggle to keep pace.
By Nancy Cleeland, Evelyn Iritani and Tyler Marshall
Times Staff Writers
November 24, 2003
SAN PEDRO SULA, HONDURAS -- When Wal-Mart Stores Inc. demands a lower price for the shirts and shorts it sells by the millions, the consequences are felt in a remote Chinese industrial town, at a port in Bangladesh and here in Honduras, under the corrugated metal roof of the Cosmos clothing factory.
Isabel Reyes, who has worked at the plant for 11 years, pushes fabric through her sewing machine 10 hours a day, struggling to meet the latest quota scrawled on a blackboard.
She now sews sleeves onto shirts at the rate of 1,200 garments a day. That's two shirts a minute, one sleeve every 15 seconds.
"There is always an acceleration," said Reyes, 37, who can't lift a cooking pot or hold her infant daughter without the anti-inflammatory pills she gulps down every few hours. "The goals are always increasing, but the pay stays the same."
Reyes, who earns the equivalent of $35 a week, says her bosses blame the long hours and low wages on big U.S. companies and their demands for ever-cheaper merchandise. Wal-Mart, the biggest company of them all, is the Cosmos factory's main customer.
Reyes is skeptical. Why, she asked, would a company in the richest country in the world care about a few pennies on a pair of shorts?