c. 1996 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Ben Gordon, a respiratory therapist and consumer from New Orleans, always asks three questions before buying: “Where does it come from? Who made it? What kind of values are behind it?”

It’s old hat for a man long accustomed to applying ethical values to the purchase of food and clothes.

Now, after years of prodding American companies to pay more attention to workplace conditions overseas, churches and other socially conscious investors are finding more Americans willing to raise Gordon’s questions for the first time for themselves.

Bluntly put: Could sweatshops have produced their children’s Christmas gifts?

“None of these issues are new for us,” said Vidette Mixon, who monitors social justice issues in companies the United Methodist Church favors with $8 billion in investments from its pension fund.

“But these concerns are getting greater visibility now. Consumers are beginning to speak up more, and information is getting out.”

In Third World countries from the Caribbean to India, families sometimes labor for 12 or more hours a day at breakneck speed, earning pennies an hour to provide soccer balls, sweat suits and blouses to American retailers, Mixon and other human rights activists say.

Consumers’ own label-reading drives home the reality that 60 percent of clothing purchased in the United States comes from overseas.

So do more than half the toys. Most of those come from Asia, especially China, where American-style working conditions are impossible to enforce.

Social advocates don’t want consumers to boycott companies, but they want their voices added to those already calling for wages that would let workers enjoy conditions beyond basic existence.

Consumers are being jolted by specific disclosures such as those last summer associating sweat-shop labor with Kathie Lee Gifford’s line of clothing. The revelation seemed to radicalize Gifford herself, turning her into a celebrity ally in the human rights advocates’ drive to educate consumers.

And the National Labor Committee _ the group that exposed the Gifford story _ recently targeted no less an American family symbol than the Walt Disney Co.

The group charged that Haitian workers employed by a local subcontractor earn $3.33 per day to assemble”101 Dalmatians”jerseys and sweat pants selling for $19.95 in the United States.

Workers sew at a brutal pace, performing a specific task on 150 shirts an hour, said the committee’s Charles Kernaghan.

During a visit last month, workers told him they sometimes give themselves only 10 minutes for lunch to make the quota that earns them the top piecework rate, he said.

Subtracting for food and transportation to and from the factories, workers keep about 43 cents a day for all their other needs, he said.”I’ve traveled a lot, but I’ve never seen such misery in my life,”said Kernaghan, who said he visited the Haitian workers in their homes _ usually an 8-by-10 shanty with a leaky tin roof and a single bare light bulb.

Quitting is not an option. Jobs are precious in Haiti, where the unemployment rate tops 65 percent.

Disney disputes Kernaghan’s economics this much: Haitian workers assembling Disney products are paid 48 cents to 52 cents per hour, not the 33 cents per hour Kernaghan asserts.

Moreover, factories run by the two primary Disney contractors have been visited by company inspectors, local authorities and U.S. Ambassador William Lacy Swing, who found them to be among the best in the country, Disney spokesman Ken Green said.

Disney executives are sure that their Haitian operations “are adhering to all applicable laws and policy and our policies as well,” Green said.

But relying on local laws as a benchmark is often little help, human rights activists say.

Employers paying “competitive” labor rates or minimum wage in many Third World countries still might be paying too little for a family to survive, much less flourish.

As a result, many groups push employers to rise above the legal minimum to pay what’s called a “sustainable wage,” a level computed locally and defined as one that meets basic needs and provides some discretionary income, with enough left over to support local businesses.

That the clothing is assembled in Haiti at all is evidence of suppliers’ “race to the bottom” to find the cheapest labor in the world, said Conrad McCarron of Progressive Asset Management, a California firm that seeks out socially conscious investments.

McCarron’s firm and the Methodist pension board, which holds 107,800 shares of Disney stock, want to raise the topic of Disney’s overseas employment practices at the company’s next shareholder meeting in February.

Talks are under way and a February confrontation might be averted, Mixon said.

The Disney case represents the complexity of the situation. American companies and retailers usually contract with overseas manufacturers for toys and clothing assembled with American labels. Those often are subcontracted to smaller operators to share the work or the assembly of certain sub-units.

“The whole industry is based on price and speed to get the product to store on time,” said the Rev. David Schilling of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which represents 275 Catholic, Protestant and Jewish institutional investors.

“In that process, when push comes to shove and a well-meaning company in the U.S. contracts with a vendor in Indonesia, that vendor may sub the work out to an unmonitored setting where 12-year-olds working long hours are involved.”

Stung by criticism of working conditions, some companies have begun formulating codes of conduct specifying safe and sanitary workplaces where their products are assembled.

Such codes frequently pledge that neither child labor nor slave labor is involved.

But limitations are immediately apparent.

In some codes, a recent Labor Department study found, standards were merely contractual, such as when a supplier pledges to honor them as a condition of doing business.

But monitoring can be spotty or non-existent, experts say. Frequently, overseas workers have no idea that an American company is at least nominally pledged to their welfare, the federal study found.

“It’s a step forward to have a code,” said Simon Billenness, a senior analyst at Franklin Research and Development, a Boston investment firm that handles money for churches and other ethically sensitive groups.

“But having a code now is mere standard practice. What’s cutting edge now is agreeing to some form of independent monitoring of your operations.”

Experts cite The GAP as a leader in allowing independent local monitoring of its Central American assembly sites.

The arrangement, negotiated by Schilling’s interfaith center, represents an approach both principled and practical.

Many human rights activists prefer not to call for boycotts, for fear of throwing impoverished workers off what little income is available. Schilling said they prefer to use their leverage as investors to keep the factories open under improving conditions.

“We try to get companies to state forthrightly what their moral values are and get them to move on that in a way that makes sense to them as business people,” he said.

For now, Schilling and others say there are relatively few tools to help consumers know how a specific product was made. But since last summer, a number of apparel makers, unions and faith groups have been working on a task force to help.

One of its ambitious goals is to produce a label telling consumers a product met minimal human rights standards in its manufacture.

“What we’re seeing now is a greater awareness on the part of consumers,” Schilling said.

“We know that, if people have the choice, they would rather purchase a garment from a source where they feel good about the workload behind the product. But that presupposes they have the information. And that’s one of the things we’re working on.”

MJP END NOLAN