Gap, the San Francisco-based store-chain (which includes Old Navy and Banana Republic), with 4,100 shops world-wide, including 180 in the UK, hit the news in the second week of January with record losses.
Sales in December were down 11% on the same month the previous year. Gap said that in the three months to February it would make a loss of $52m. The company has debts of more than $2bn.
Gap has a nice image and has spent millions on advertising.
But the reality is that Gap is also a notorious sweatshop employer.
In October 2000 the investigative TV programme Panorama exposed Gap as using child labour in Cambodia.
In Mexican sweatshops Gap produces expensive clothes for British stores, but the workers are paid 28 cents an hour.
Cambodian and Chinese workers producing for Gap stores can earn as little at 22 pence per day.
There are reports suggesting some Russian clothing workers are earning as little as 11 cents an hour.
Meanwhile, in 2000 Gap CEO Millard Dexter "earned" a massive £23,000 per day.
Gap state in their Code of Conduct that they support free trade unions. However they do not have a recognition agreement in Britain and use factories in countries like China where free trade unions are illegal. Gap has still not honoured a pledge to allow independent factory inspection of factory working conditions beyond a single experiment in a Central American factory.
In America trade unions are campaigning for Donald Fisher, Chair of Gap, settle a law suit being brought against the company over the treatment of workers on the island of Saipan.
Saipan is a US territory half-way between China and America. The company is accused of hiring immigrant workers from China, Thailand, Philippines, Bangladesh and Vietnam on Saipan, making workers sign contracts which effectively make them indentured labourers after paying large recruitment fees; workdays are often 12 hours, seven days a week; workers are housed in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions; and unions are stopped from organising.
The US's Occupational Safety and Health Association (OSHA) has cited over 1,000 health and safety violations on Saipan - including insufficient clean drinking water, blocked factory exits, fire hazards and exposed electrical wiring.
The US unions want a "living wage" clause written into Gap's Code and threaten that until Gap settles they will "continue to pressure [Gap] through educating consumers and protesting your stores and headquarters."
No Sweat, the British anti-sweatshop campaign exists to help stamp out sweatshop labour.
No Sweat believes that every worker, everywhere in the world, deserves the right to a living wage, respect at work and the right to join a free trade union.
We combine solidarity work with workers in the Third World with work to organise unions in sweatshops in Britain. We unite students, youth, trade unionists and anti-capitalists.
Join the campaign!
No Sweat PO Box 36707 London SW9 8YA
07907 431 959
Email: admin@nosweat.org.uk
http://www.nosweat.org.uk
