Group Switches Focus From Kathie to Mickey

Mickey Mouse, one of the few American faces more famous than Kathie Lee Gifford’s, will be the next target of the National Labor Committee, the small, New York-based worker rights group that first linked the talk show host to sweatshop labor.

“Our next campaign is Disney; I’ve already sent a 13-page letter to [Walt Disney Co. CEO] Michael Eisner,” Charles Kernaghan, the committee’s executive director, said in an interview Wednesday. “Disney has sweatshops in Haiti that pay starvation wages with inhumane conditions.”

Kernaghan’s allegations refer to two U.S. apparel manufacturers under contract to produce children’s clothing with the Disney label. He stood up from his desk and walked over to a table with a Pocahontas shirt. “This was made by people struggling to survive,” he said.

Disney has been denying such allegations since January, when the committee first made them public in a report titled “The U.S. in Haiti. How to Get Rich on 11 Cents an Hour.”

Disney spokesman Chuck Champlin said the charges are disputed by not only its manufacturers in Haiti, but also by the U.S. State Department.

Champlin cited a recent letter from a State Department official to Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.). The letter said that based on unannounced visits, the U.S. embassy staff in Haiti found “a pattern of widespread compliance with minimum wages laws, with most workers earning substantially more than the minimum wage.”

Champlin also said that Disney representatives had been to Haiti to verify that the factories are following the laws and are properly maintained.

The minimum wage in the hemisphere’s poorest nation is 28 cents an hour. While Kernaghan had earlier alleged that Disney’s contractors violated the minimum wage laws, his letter to Eisner, faxed on May 29, does not repeat that charge. Instead, it details wretched working and living conditions.

“Is it possible to survive in Haiti on 28 cents an hour?” the letter asks.

Among those sewing the Mickey Mouse and Lion King garments is a single mother with four young children, the letter described. “They lived in a one-room windowless shack, 8 by 11 feet wide, lit by one bare bulb and with a tin roof that leaked. . . . The toilet was a hole in the ground, shared with 10 other families.”

In one of the factories, according to the committee, “supervisors put enormous, constant pressure on the workers to go faster. . . . The toilets are filthy. Rats are everywhere. The holding tank for drinking water is covered only with a light piece of metal, which the rats have no trouble getting under. In the last week of April . . . rats that had been poisoned were floating in the water tank.”

The watchdog group has only three paid employees and a quickly exhausted annual budget of $250,000. It has been decrying sweatshops for more than a decade, but it has never sensed more momentum than now, its name coupled with Kathie Lee Gifford’s in a flood of news stories.

Disney is another high-profile target. The committee asks to “open a serious dialogue with Walt Disney representatives regarding working conditions and wages in Haitian factories” where its clothes are made.

Eisner has not answered the letter. Months ago, Champlin, the Disney spokesman, called Kernaghan several times, leaving messages that were never returned. “Back then, I had nothing to say to him,” Kernaghan said Wednesday. “Besides, why speak with public relations people? I’ve sent a 13-page letter to Michael Eisner.”

Two of Disney’s licensees manufacture in Haiti, L.V. Myles Inc. and H.H. Cutler Co. They either make the clothes themselves or subcontract the work to others. Paul Miller, president of L.V. Myles, denied the committee’s accusations, saying his company made “periodic, unannounced visits” to their Haitian subcontractors to make sure all laws are obeyed.

The chief representative for H.H. Cutler was unavailable for comment.