Factory Defies Sweatshop Label, but Can It Thrive?

[madinmaryland]

VILLA ALTAGRACIA, Dominican Republic

SITTING in her tiny living room here, Santa Castillo beams about the new house that she and her husband are building directly behind the wooden shack where they now live.

The new home will be four times bigger, with two bedrooms and an indoor bathroom; the couple and their three children now share a windowless bedroom and rely on an outhouse two doors away.

Ms. Castillo had long dreamed of a bigger, sturdier house, but three months ago something happened that finally made it possible: she landed a job at one of the world’s most unusual garment factories. Industry experts say it is a pioneer in the developing world because it pays a “living wage” — in this case, three times the average pay of the country’s apparel workers — and allows workers to join a union without a fight.

“We never had the opportunity to make wages like this before,” says Ms. Castillo, a soft-spoken woman who earns $500 a month. “I feel blessed.”

The factory is a high-minded experiment, a response to appeals from myriad university officials and student activists that the garment industry stop using poverty-wage sweatshops. It has 120 employees and is owned by Knights Apparel, a privately held company based in Spartanburg, S.C., that is the leading supplier of college-logo apparel to American universities, according to the Collegiate Licensing Company.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/business/global/18shirt.html?hp

While I am glad that the owner is making an effort to pay the workers a fairer wage, it still begs the question of why the company sent the jobs to the Dominican Republic. It is still an effort to break the American worker and force them to take lower wages.

[msongs]

1. have you seen the jacked up prices for colleg logo apparell? Our local colleges charge

$50 for a logo sweatshirt. you can get a similar sweatshirt, without logo, at Target for less than $10.

Msongs

[MineralMan]

3. Several layers of middlemen in that business. All of them want

to double the price, it seems. Vicious cycle. And then, there's the University, itself, insisting on a profit from the use of their logo.

[MineralMan]

2. Not a lot of Americans who work for $500/mo., I guess.

At the higher rate they're paying these workers, they may have a hard time competing with the factories who pay less. If they paid competitive wages to US workers, they couldn't compete, since most such clothing is made outside of the US. It's a vicious cycle.

[madinmaryland]

4. That is seven days of minimum wage pay in the states.

Yes, it is a vicious cycle. Not sure how it can be changed, especially by the corporate owned government we have here.

[MineralMan]

5. I have no idea how it can be changed.

It's a combination of consumer demand for low-priced goods and the corporate environment. I don't have any solutions to suggest. It costs what it costs to make and distribute this stuff. If it costs too much, the consumer won't buy it. It's a never-ending cycle. It sucks.

[Warpy]

6. Don't forget it also reflects the exchange rate

$500/month is a very respectable wage in the Dominican Republic and allows people to do more than live paycheck to paycheck when it's translated into the local currency. Oh, Mrs. Castillo isn't going to live up to American gated community standards, but she'll achieve the standard of living workers here enjoyed before corporations sent all the good jobs offshore.

I have no objection to companies that opened factories overseas once trade barriers dropped. Those factories should have created and served regional markets overseas instead of closing factories here, though. That is the objectionable part, that US labor was sold out.

Now they're all scratching their heads and wondering why their sales have dropped. Well, duh.