New York City
In “Economists vs. Students” [Feb. 12], Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood cheer on students who demand that garments bearing their college’s logo be made under decent conditions. The students are right. These garments cost enough to enable employers to pay wages sufficient to meet the basic needs of their workers. Indeed, the economic argument is stronger than the one the authors present. Better-paid, better-educated, healthy workers are more productive, more likely to stay longer and produce better-quality products that benefit the bottom line.
Unfortunately this article, lauding people who fight to improve the plight of workers, misrepresents a code of conduct with the same goals and an effective implementation record: SA8000, the Social Accountability International standard for decent working conditions, and its independent verification system. This information is readily available on SAI’s website, www.sa-intl.org.
(1) SA8000 is not led by multinationals. Half the SA8000 advisory board is composed of public interest organizations and trade unions from around the world. These include Amnesty International, trade unions representing 25 million workers (many in the developing world), the National Child Labor Committee, the Maquila Solidarity Network and the comptroller of New York City. Professor Jagdish Bhagwati did once serve on the SA8000 advisory board but does not currently.
(2) Audits of certified factories are by no means “sporadic.” On the contrary, they are scheduled at regular six-month intervals. SA8000 auditors are highly trained. Furthermore, the training is and will continue to be regularly evaluated and improved. Far from being superficial, the SA8000 audits require an unusual depth of investigation and worker interviews. Public reports are an SA8000 requirement.
(3) The SA8000 factory cited in the article, where auditors did get bamboozled by a management cover-up, had its certification suspended in a fraction of the time it takes for legal remedies, at zero cost to those who brought the complaint. The loss of its certificate puts it at high risk of losing at least one of its largest customers, so it is under considerable pressure to reform. The certification body that issued the SA8000 certificate has been required to significantly improve its audit procedures. This is prima facie evidence of a system that works.
(4) China is, indeed, “not a friendly environment for independent union organizing,” since the right to organize is severely restricted by law, and civil society is virtually nonexistent–and often violently repressed–there. Rates for limbs lost to industrial accidents in parts of China are appallingly high, just one indicator of the cost to workers. Yet 70 percent of toys are made in China, as well as dominant portions of garment manufacture. The 1.2 billion people of China deserve a genuine effort to improve their lot. Where freedom of association is prohibited by law, SA8000 states that employers must provide “parallel means” for free association, such as: a worker-elected SA8000 representative and committees for health and safety, wage negotiations, literacy and complaints and resolutions.
In a world with much exploitation by employers, those who are ardently seeking to change working conditions for the better should work together rather than snipe at one another.
ALICE TEPPER MARLIN, president
New York City
Nowhere do we say that SAI is “led by multinationals”; we quote an outside observer who calls it a “PR tool for multinationals,” a characterization repeated by many sources. Watching Alice Tepper Marlin fawn over a Toys ‘R’ Us exec at the SAI conference this past December lent considerable credence to this view. On the advisory board, business members outnumber labor members by more than two to one (not counting the New York City comptroller, who manages one of the world’s largest stock portfolios).
Inspections every six months sounds reassuring, but scheduled at predictable intervals and announced in advance, they’re unlikely to expose abuses. Snap visits would be much more effective. We’re happy to hear that the offending factory eventually lost its certification, but it’s troubling that it got approved in the first place; auditors are supposed to see through managers’ attempts at bamboozlement. SAI’s auditor on the scene, Det Norske Veritas, told the South China Morning Post that it’s impossible to do reliable audits in China: “The factories always manage to find a way around the auditors.” We’re also happy SAI is broadly trying to improve the lot of workers in China, but certifying factories there implies that they meet the criteria of free association in SAI’s high-minded code, which they clearly do not. We don’t see how “parallel means,” whatever they are (and they sound like company unions), could possibly be a substitute for independent organizing.
As for Tepper Marlin’s “economic argument,” we’re always amused when NGO directors suggest they know more about running businesses than managers. If profits are fatter when workers are well paid and well fed, why are there so many miserably exploited people in the world? Businesses pay higher wages only when they’re forced to.
LIZA FEATHERSTONE
Whately, Mass.
Why put up with all the punditry and spiel in Ken Burns’s Jazz [Gene Santoro, “All That Jazz,” Jan. 29], when the photos, film clips and musical sequences are so wonderful? After all, this is the digital age of free-for-all pirating of images and sound. Just record each episode of Jazz on your VCR (fess up…you’re already doing that, aren’t you?). Then acquire cheap (or even free) digital video-editing software for your home computer. Load the footage onto your hard drive. Then eliminate the interminable “talking heads” (I’d get rid of all the Wynton Marsalis and keep most of the Gary Giddins, some Stanley Crouch and a few other odds and ends). Assemble your favorite clips into the sequences you like (say, a full hour of Louis Armstrong photos, film clips and music). You can do this over and over again in whatever order you like. In fact, it’s this kind of cut and paste that makes up Burns’s filmmaking technique, no?
DAVID MAXCY
Evanston, Ill.
Gene Santoro makes a minor factual error in his review of Ken Burns’s Jazz. Burns’s Baseball does not stop in 1970. An entire episode is devoted to post-1970 developments. I was on the film’s advisory board. There’s a segment on the 1986 World Series, when Boston was one out away from the championship in game six but lost to the Mets on a wild pitch and an error. At the final preview screening my friend Ken, a die-hard Red Sox fan, left the room. He still couldn’t bear to look.
BERNARD A. WEISBERGER
New York City
My slip is showing, but it’s Freudian. Baseball‘s final episode was as much of a mess as Jazz‘s.
GENE SANTORO
New York City
I love Calvin Trillin’s poems. Who could forget “Norm, Norm, big as a dorm” and “Al D’Amato, sleazeball obbligato”? Brilliant! But this Nader thing has got to stop [“Silver Linings,” Jan. 22]. Nader took votes from Gore, sure, but he also got Republican, libertarian and independent votes. Yet somehow these votes, as opposed to Democrats who voted for G. Dubya, made the difference. I don’t buy it. Meanwhile, the “liberal” Joe Biden, who voted to confirm Antonin Scalia and who couldn’t stop eleven colleagues from defecting for Clarence Thomas, supported John Ashcroft at first. Hmm… What rhymes with Delaware–nice new hair? Cynically aware? We’ll decide what’s fair? Spines in us are rare?
Nader, an important voice, like Trillin’s own, has informed so many about so much for so long. Basta!
CHRIS PEDRO TRAKAS
Cherry Hill, N.J.
Calvin Trillin has a gift Which is why I wonder at his pique JACK HINGER
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Ashcroft, Whitman, Norton and Watt 50 Dems ignored the Black Caucus ordeal SAMANTHA BERG
THE SUITES & THE SWEATS
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Social Accountability International
FEATHERSTONE & HENWOOD REPLY
DOUG HENWOOD
‘GO TO IT, O JAZZMEN’
SANTORO REPLIES
DEAD-WRONG POET?
For skewering those with whom he’s miffed.
His caustic rhyming the right wing singes,
As he goes snark-hunting in their fringes.
His targets tend to represent
Insiders of the Establishment.
At Ralph O’Green, who had the cheek
To charge both parties with selling out
To corporate cash and controlling clout.
Trillin’s focus seems less than keen
When he waxes snide at Ralph O’Green.
Mr. Trillin has bones to pick with this lot.
I agree with his gripes; they mirror mine,
But why blame Nader for Dems’ lack of spine?
(Senate fetes might lose their warm feel).
I know why he puts blame on Nader alone:
It’s easier than rhyming 50 names in a poem.
