 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
The Soon Coming Judgment Of God Upon America and How To Escape It 205
Sweatshops
For years the United States has been loosing manufacturing jobs to overseas competitors.
Domestic manufactures, at an alarming rate, have been moving their production overseas to take
advantage of extremely cheap labor. There are legitimate economic explanations for much of the
differences that exist between labor costs in the U.S. and lesser developed nations and
underdeveloped nations. But these economic explanations don’t account for conditions that exist
in many sweatshops where the workers are little more than slaves. In fact they can live in
conditions much worse than that which America’s slaves endured prior to the Emancipation
Proclamation.
In 1850 a slave that worked the fields sold for $1,000 to $1,800 in the U.S. In today’s
dollars, that would amount to somewhere in the area of $50,000 to $100,000. These slaves where
enormous investments and generated profits of only about 5 percent per year.
597
While these
slaves were certainly abused and their God given freedom was deprived, for the most part their
basic needs were met. They were fed and housed and their health maintained because of the
enormous investment involved. Today, many workers work 60 to 80 hour weeks and don’t make
enough money to adequately feed and house their families. Wages of $1 or $2 a day are common
in many parts of the world were workers are producing goods for American companies. The
lowest wage I found referenced was 1/10 of a cent per hour in a Chinese factory producing
handbags for sale in Wal-Mart.
598
One study conducted by the National Labor Council found apparel workers in Nicaragua
were starting at a base rate of 10 cents per hour with the average being about 30 cents. The
average worker was putting in 56 hours a week and earning $17.31. These workers were making
designer label apparel for the U.S.
599
Many other workers earn subsistence wages while
producing goods for the U.S. market. The following are example of some of the reported
subsistence hourly wages paid to workers producing goods for the U.S.: Workers in Bangladesh
earn 8–25 cents per hour, Burma 7–14 cents, Haiti 25–55 cents, Honduras 27-31 cents, Indonesia
14-45 cents, and Vietnam 15 cents.
600
The National Labor Committee for Human Rights issued a report on Chinese labor
practices in 2000. The report detailed horrible working conditions where workers were paid as
low as 3 cents an hour. These workers were subjected to “98-hour work weeks and compulsory
unpaid overtime.” In one account the report documented how 16 and 17 year old girls were paid
22 cents per hour for a 70-hour week. But they had quotas that were impossible to meet. This
would require them to work overtime to meet their quota. Typically they were not paid for these
extra hours; sometimes they received a standard piece rate. These women were making shoes for
Timberland. “China accounts for 60 percent of all the shoes imported to the U.S., with a retail
value of $16.9 billion a year.”
In one shoe factory 46 percent of the workers who were surveyed said they owed money
to the company at the end of the month. The top 14% of the workers in this factory were earning
just 60 cents a day.
The overall average factory pay, averaged across all industries, faired better. The average
pay was $65 per month or $2.16 per day. Unfortunately, “to maintain a very modest diet for a
three-person family costs approximately $72.29 a month, which is more than most factory
 |