Campaign fights to close Gap
To mark International Women’s Day, anti-globalisation campaigners will be targeting Gap stores in towns and cities throughout Scotland, Wales and England.
Gap may want to promote a chic image, but it severely exploits women workers in inhuman conditions in the Third World while persuading women here to pay inflated prices for its brand name.
Together with the actions on March 5 against pharmaceutical companies (see below), these protests show that the movement to globalise resistance is taking root in a big way in Britain.
Organising to take people to international events like those in Seattle, Prague and Nice will play an important part in the campaign.
At this level the key focus will be the demonstration in Genoa against the G8 summit on July 20.But what was also obvious to the 250 activists who turned up to a planning meeting in London last month was that we needed to think globally and act locally.
Clearly action at a local level allows more people to get directly involved than the smaller numbers who can get to the international actions.
Gap, like Nike, is an industry leader which also owns Banana Republic and Old Navy. It has become one of the most profitable and fastest-growing clothing retailers in the world.
In 1999 its turnover was $11.6 billion of which $1.1 billion was net profit. Last year Gap Chief Executive Millard Drexler received $172.8 million in salary, bonuses, and stock options.
In 1995 Gap was the target of an anti-sweatshop campaign the because of union-busting in its Mandarin factory in El Salvador. After successful grassroots mobilisation, Gap agreed to a monitoring system at that factory that continues to this day.
While Gap received good publicity for this move, it failed to implement all the reforms. It put minimal resources into the monitoring system and reneged on its pledge to extend such monitoring to other factories in the region.
Furthermore, in three years of discussions with anti-sweatshop groups, Gap has failed to do anything about wages.
Following a meeting with activists, the company agreed to a statement that no worker making products for Gap should live in poverty, but refused to take the next step and accept responsibility for ensuring that workers are paid a living wage.
Saipan is a 47 sq mile island in the Pacific, part of the North Mariana Islands, which include Guam, and are all US territory.
The island is replete with sweatshops, and Gap does the most business of any company there – over $200 million a year, contracting in six factories. Companies import without tariff or quota restrictions and label their clothes ‘Made in the USA,’ but do not have to adhere to US labor laws.
Workers and anti-sweatshop groups filed a billion dollar lawsuit against Gap and 17 other retailers for labour abuses in Saipan. But the problem is undoubtedly broader than Saipan.
In Russia, Gap pays factory workers just 11 cents an hour and keeps them in slave-like conditions. Workers from Macao contacted the Asia Monitor Resource Center in Hong Kong complaining of abusive treatment by factory managers, who forced them to work excessive overtime and cheated them out of their pay.
A delegation from the US National Labor Committee in June 1999 reported that Honduran Gap factory workers are subjected to forced pregnancy tests, forced overtime, exceedingly high production goals, locked bathrooms, and wages of $4/day, which only meet 1/3 of their basic needs.
The workers said that if they tried to organise a union or even become more informed of their rights, they would be fired. They had never heard of Gap’s code of conduct.
In Indonesia, 700 workers went on strike in July, 1997 protesting miserable wages and the factory management’s refusal to recognise their independent union.
These are just a few of the reasons why Gap will be a target of action this month. Gap – along with other brand multinationals like Nike – are fitting targets of anti-globalisation protestors, especially on International Women’s Day.
We demand a living wage for all workers and the right to organise.