Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Those who don't sweat

A recent e-mailed release from the US organisation Campaign for Labour 
Rights (CLR) made some pertinent points about just who is ultimately 
responsible for sweatshops in Third World countries.

CLR noted that campaigners against sweatshop abuses sometimes meet with the 
argument that although sweatshops pay low wages and are rotten places to 
work in, "what other options do these workers have?" To which CLR responds: 
"We should ask why there are no better options."

They then go on to point the finger fairly and squarely at international 
lenders such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-
American Development Bank, various foreign governments and private foreign 
banks.

Between them these lenders have loaned billions for projects in 
underdeveloped countries.

"While many of those loans ostensibly were for development, all too often 
they have proved to be the prime reason that so much of the world remains 
`underdeveloped', a cruel euphemism for economic desperation", they write.

Loans were negotiated in secret and funds frequently provided to 
governments "known to be headed by the corrupt and the despotic".

Some of the loan funds simply went into the pockets of the more overtly 
corrupt. But even where the loans were used to finance projects, the 
profits from the projects went to corporations in the developed capitalist 
countries and elites in the undeveloped countries.

But, as CLR says, "while the profits were privatised, the obligation to pay 
back those loans has been socialised. And it is those least able to pay and 
who gained the least from the projects who have borne the cost of 
repayment: workers and the poor.

"Burdened with impossible debts, impoverished nations have been forced by 
their international creditors to undergo structural adjustment programs as 
a condition for rescheduling debt payments.

Among the effects of structural adjustment are:

"* Ending credit to small businesses, causing massive bankruptcies, 
throwing millions of workers into unemployment and creating [not by 
accident] a job force for sweatshop industries;

"* Ending credit to small farmers, with the same result as above;

"* Establishing tax-free, low-wage free trade zones for sweatshop 
operations."

The US campaigners say, "if we want to end sweatshop abuses, we need to end 
the basis for sweatshops". And the obvious way to do that is to support 
calls for the cancelling of Third World debt.

The scandalous maintenance of a crushing debt burden on poor countries, a 
burden that requires that they pay a ridiculously high proportion of their 
gross national product just to pay the interest on their loans, must 
end.

Fidel Castro has called on the Third World countries to press for 
cancellation of their international debt.

It is a call that is gaining support, but the most that the World Bank, the 
IMF and other institutions will hear of is "debt reduction", and not much 
of that, either.

And that's all we'll ever hear of as long as the "rights" of a handful of 
international banks to earn interest on money they never sweated for are 
deemed to be more important than millions of lives blighted and degraded by 
the devastating effects of debt on poor countries.

* * *

Sweatshop shopping

There is of course another corporate cause of the sweatshop phenomenon, 
and that is the corporations that go shopping around for the sweatshops 
with the lowest wages, the longest hours, the least health and safety 
"inconveniences" and of course the least environmental protection.

These global pirates move their production offshore so they can indulge in 
labour practices that would be illegal in their country of origin. 

Shifting production to another country so that you can utilise sweatshops 
should be made illegal.

One day it will be. When the workers are calling the tune.

* * *

Mitch wipes out debts?

Hurricane Mitch left the Central American nations of Honduras, 
Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala totally unable to service their 
debts. It will cost billions of dollars and take years to repair the damage 
from Mitch.

Both France and Cuba have already erased the debts owed them by these 
countries, and other creditor nations are supporting debt cancellation.

But the US, richest of the capitalist countries, and leader of the 
international creditor regime, has declined to cancel their debts, 
preferring instead to offer "aid", which will then return (to US banks) as 
debt repayments.