30 Sep 2002,
Dear Anti - Sweatshop Activists,
This past week, the lawsuit by Global Exchange, Asian Law Caucus, Sweatshop Watch, and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE!) against the GAP and 25 other clothing retailers for exploitation in Saipan has finally been settled! Thanks to all our coalition partners for an amazing struggle that has finally resulted in justice for garment workers on US soil. This is a historic breakthrough and a SIGNIFICANT VICTORY for the anti-sweatshop movement.

Please take a few moments to read this informative and thorough article by Rob Collier, pasted below, from the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle which details the implications of this historic victory.

We especially want to take a moment to thank Chie Abad, the amazing, hardworking, driven, strong, and inspiring activist, who has spent the last three years of her life criss-crossing the US to speak about the exploitation to which she was subjected for years as a GAP worker in Saipan. Without her, all of this work would not have been possible. Thank you, Chie, for your courage and steadfastness in the face of mass opposition from Big Business to workers' human rights.

And THANK YOU to all you amazing activists out there across the U.S. and internationally who have supported this effort to bring justice to garment workers. Without you, this never would have happened. Please know that your hard work has finally paid off!

Now - on to the one hold-out, Levi's!!!!

Clothiers fold on sweatshop lawsuit
Saipan workers to get millions; Levi holds out

Robert Collier and Jenny Strasburg
Friday, September 27, 2002

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/09/27/MN180746.DTL

Ending a three-year legal battle, 26 of America's biggest clothing retailers have settled a class-action lawsuit over alleged sweatshop abuses on Saipan, a U.S. island in the western Pacific.

In the agreement, announced Thursday, San Francisco's Gap Inc., six other U.S. firms and 23 local manufacturers on Saipan joined 19 retailers that had previously agreed to a settlement. The deal creates a $20 million fund to pay back wages to workers and create a monitoring system to prevent labor abuses.

Levi Strauss & Co., a $4 billion company that sells jeans, khakis and casual separates under the Levi and Dockers brands, refused to settle and will continue to fight the lawsuit.

The groups that brought the suit -- Asian Law Caucus and Global Exchange, both of San Francisco, Sweatshop Watch of Oakland and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees -- said the settlement would bring new pressure to end exploitation in the vast network of foreign factories that cater to U.S. consumers' fashion appetites.

"This is a significant victory because it pushes the envelope on how far workers and consumers can press retailers to be responsible for the conditions under which our clothes are made," said Nikki Bas, co-director of Sweatshop Watch.

Bas and other plaintiffs said the deal would rejuvenate the nation's anti- sweatshop movement, which has been a cause celebre on college campuses but has been struggling to turn its noisy protests into concrete results.

The deal's provisions include:

-- Code of conduct: Companies agree to comply with basic employment standards, including extra pay for overtime work, safe food and drinking water.

-- Monitoring: A panel of three retired judges will be set up to oversee a program of factory monitoring, which the parties tentatively agreed would be carried out by the International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency. The inspectors will conduct unannounced inspections of the factories and investigate worker complaints. The judges can order payment of back wages, establish cures for violations found by the monitors and, in worst cases, place manufacturers on probation for repeated noncompliance with the code of conduct.

-- Compensation: An estimated 30,000 current and former garment workers in Saipan are eligible to share about $6.4 million for unpaid back wages.

-- Repatriation: Workers who want to return to their home countries will be eligible for up to $3,000 in travel and relocation costs.

In addition to Gap, the companies settling this week are Abercrombie & Fitch, Target, J.C. Penney, Lane Bryant Inc., The Limited Inc. and Talbots Inc.

Firms that settled previously include Gymboree Corp. of Burlingame, Sears Roebuck and Co., Nordstrom, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Polo Ralph Lauren and Liz Claiborne.

The settlement does not involve an admission of wrongdoing by the defendants.

In explaining Levi's refusal to join the settlement, spokeswoman Linda Butler said that the company had its own factory-monitoring program, which was among the first and most far-reaching to be introduced by a global apparel retailer.

"As we've said in the past, the allegations in the lawsuit are just not true against our company, and we feel that settling untrue claims is a compromise of our company's values," Butler said.

Gap Inc. spokesman Alan Marks shrugged off the effect of the settlement, saying it would not change the company's internal monitoring process, in which about 80 inspectors oversee the contractors that make its clothes in about 50 countries.

At least one company that settled, however, reacted bitterly.

"It is a sad fact that these lawsuits were never about the public good," said James Hale, executive vice president for Target Corp. "They were simply one more instance of class-action lawyers acting as publicity profiteers by using the media to smear a company's reputation without regard for the truth."

Saipan is one of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth that is exempt from American labor, immigration and customs laws.

As a result of these exemptions, Saipan's billion-dollar-per-year apparel industry is allowed to stamp its clothing with "Made in the USA" tags and thus avoid the complex system of quotas that limits U.S. imports from foreign nations.

In addition, the commonwealth's apparel and tourist industries are allowed to bring about 20,000 workers annually from East Asian nations, mainly China and the Philippines. The plaintiffs say these workers are trapped in a kind of modern-day indentured servitude, in which workers are forced to pay recruitment fees of as much as $5,000 each, forced to work overtime and kept in debt with paycheck deductions for housing and food.

"If they complained, they would be fired," said Michael Rubin, the plaintiffs' lead lawyer and a partner at Altshuler Berzon Nussbaum Rubin & Demain in San Francisco. "They would then be deported. They did whatever they were told to do, with whatever conditions existed."

The Marianas' minimum wage is $3.05 per hour, far less than the $5.15 per hour minimum nationwide and $6.75 per hour in California.

Democrats in Congress, led by Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, have tried to end the commonwealth's exemptions from U.S. law and bring it under full federal control. But reform legislation has been repeatedly blocked by House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas.

E-mail the writers at rcollier@sfchronicle.com and
jstrasburg@sfchronicle.com.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page A - 1

Global California
For anti-sweatshop activists, recent settlement is only tip of iceberg
By Robert Collier

Sunday, September 29, 2002
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f
=/c/a/2002/09/29/MN218571.DTL

The anti-sweatshop movement, long a thorn in the side of such corporations as Gap and Nike, got a big boost last week when 26 major retail apparel companies settled a lawsuit and agreed to establish an ambitious system to monitor working conditions in U.S. manufacturing plants located overseas.

The settlement, agreed to by San Francisco's Gap Inc. and Burlingame's Gymboree Inc., established a $20 million fund to pay back wages to workers on the island of Saipan in the western Pacific, and to create a system to prevent labor abuses there.

But the groups that brought the lawsuit, including San Francisco's Global Exchange, the Asian Law Caucus and Oakland's Sweatshop Watch, say they have a long way to go.

"While we have some significant victories like the Saipan one, companies at the same time are moving in the opposite direction, continuing to gravitate toward countries with as few safeguards for workers' rights as possible," said Medea Benjamin, founding director of San Francisco-based Global Exchange, one of the lead groups in the Saipan lawsuit.

In fact, most industry watchers expect Saipan to be abandoned altogether by apparel firms in 2005, when new World Trade Organization rules force the United States to abolish its system of apparel import quotas. Retailers are expected to switch their manufacturing outsourcing from Saipan and other relatively high-cost locales to China, where wages are rock-bottom, labor abuses are ignored and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is a compliant tool of the government.

"Saipan is just the tip of the iceberg," said Katie Quan, director of the Henning Center for International Labor Relations at UC Berkeley, which has worked extensively in China.

Quan said the challenge for activists and corporations alike is to develop relations with the Chinese regime, which sees anti-sweatshop concerns as unwelcome foreign meddling with its internal affairs.

"There has to be a process of constructive engagement, and relations have to be built with the unions in China," she said.

A small, but important, first step occurred late last year, when U.S. activists and Reebok Inc. forced one of the company's suppliers, Kong Tai Shoes in Longgang, Guangdong province, to allow workers to elect an independent union. The union is the only one in China not under the thumb of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.

In fact, many companies like Reebok, Gap and Levi Strauss & Co. of San Francisco have made concerted efforts in recent years to implement anti- sweatshop codes of conduct for their supply chains. This process has been spearheaded by Business for Social Responsibility, a corporate group in San Francisco that conducts training programs around the world for executives and factory floor managers in ethical labor practices.

In the past few years, at least 250 U.S. companies, mostly in the apparel, footwear and toy industries, have created codes of conduct for their suppliers.

"Companies are starting to work more closely with their suppliers, developing management systems to make sure that factories take more ownership of the codes (of conduct) and that the changes are sustainable," said Debbie O'Brien, director of the group's business and human rights program.

She praised the Saipan settlement as "a very promising possibility" because it designated the International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency, to carry out the monitoring program. The ILO's unique structure emphasizes cooperation between the private sector, unions and government, so it enjoys the trust of corporations, she said.

Another initiative is the Fair Labor Association, a consortium of major apparel and footwear firms and nonprofit groups whose worldwide monitoring system will become fully operational in January.

UC Berkeley, UCSF, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz and Santa Clara University are among the 173 colleges nationwide that have signed on to the Fair Labor Association to help ensure that the caps, T-shirts and other merchandise bearing their logos be made without exploitation.

But reform will continue to be a slow, arduous process, activists agree. With the apparel and footwear industries creating an ever-expanding production chain, along with a vast, complex web of contractors and subcontractors all over the world, labor abuses have become more, not less, common.

"There's no single magic bullet for any of this," said Garrett Brown, coordinator of the Maquiladora Health and Safety Support Network, a coalition of occupational safety professionals that trains workers in Mexico, Indonesia and China and is based in Berkeley.

He said that action must be taken on many fronts -- including emphasizing labor rights in international trade treaties, strengthening the ILO and domestic laws, and enforcing corporate codes of conduct.

"You're pushing a glacier uphill, because all the force of economics and politics has been headed downhill on us for the past 20 years. So we have to push on all fronts, slowly, bit by bit, to make a difference."

E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier@sfchronicle.com.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page A - 14