Wal-Mart: Cheap Prices, Cheap Labor
by Kathryn Reid
January 2003
In Honduras young women are working in Wal-Mart Sweatshops. "Young women enter these factories at 14, 15, 16 and 17 years old. They become a mechanism of production, working 9 hours a day plus two, three or four hours overtime, performing on the exact same piece of operation over and over, day after day. A woman in the pressing department is required to iron 1,200 shirts a day, standing on her feet, her hands and fingers swell up from the hot iron. These young workers rarely last more than six years in the maquila, when they leave exhausted. They leave without having learned any useful skills or developed intellectually. These young workers entered the maquila with a sixth grade education, with no understanding of the maquila, the companies whose clothing they sew or the forces shaping where they fit into the global economy. They soon feel impotent, seeing that the Ministry of Labor does nothing, or almost nothing, to help defend their rights."
"Going into these factories is like entering prison, where you leave your life outside. The factory owners do not let--and don't want--the young workers to think for themselves. They want them to be stupid. The workers need permission to use the bathroom, and they are told when they can and cannot go.
"The women sit on hard wooden benches, without back rests, in long production lines of 60 or more sewers, for 12 hours a day or more, in a hot, windowless, dusty factory." Occasionally they have to work twenty-four hour shifts, working right through the night. It's not a choice. They are forced to do so. If they cannot work the required overtime then they are suspended without pay and sometimes they are even laid off.
These women work for so long and get so little in return. They receive 43 cents an hour, which is almost nothing. "The minimum wage [in Honduras] is considered insufficient to provide for a decent standard of living for a worker and family." It's not even enough to by milk, juice, meat, fruit, cereals, or even vitamins for their children, let alone purchase new clothing to wear. It's no surprise that Christmas is just like every other day for these families. "There is no money for a special meal or even the cheapest of toys to give as gifts to their children."
These women are required to work so long and hard. It's there only way to make some money and what they earn is hardly enough to by food and clothing. Day after day they work in these sweatshops to get paid next to nothing.
Sources Used:
http://www.nlcnet.org/walmart/honwal.htm
http://www.sweatshopwatch.org/swatch/industry/
http://www.eldis.org
Mariko Curran