Stitching Together a Crusade

If only earning a living were as carefree as: Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go. But the Haitian women who stitch together the Mickey Mouse pajamas and Pocahontas T-shirts wake up on the concrete floors of windowless hovels. They are a tired and dream-forsaken lot, leaving behind hungry children in the muddy alleyways.

Instead of heigh-ho, heigh-ho, they say mwen pa malad--at least I’m not sick. Their song is a psalm of desperation.

To get from the slums to the garment factories, these workers crowd into open-air trucks, their bodies packed as tightly as olives in a jar. The sun steams away the dawn, the morning heat slathering moisture across their skin. The bumpy ride costs 33 cents each way. A breakfast of cornmeal and fruit juice is an additional 53, a lunch of rice and beans--66 more. The spending adds up until it devours most of the earnings.

Garment workers in Haiti are paid about $2.40 a day.

In the global economy, it is the wretched of the Earth who increasingly put the clothes on our backs, their dreary, low-paid labor responsible for the smooth, patterned fabric against our skin. Made in Haiti. Made in China. Made in Bangladesh. Made in (the sweatshops of the) USA.

Attached to the labels is a price tag. For those Pocahontas T-shirts, it says $10.97 at Wal-Mart. How much of that goes to the Haitian workers? A reasonable estimate would be about 8 cents. So the next questions become:

Is there a way to cut a bigger slice for the labor? Would the consumer pay more, the manufacturer or retailer accept less?

Such questions consume the life of a workers-rights advocate named Charles Kernaghan, the same shoot-from-the-hip, anti-corporate gadfly who recently sullied the snow-white image of Kathie Lee Gifford. He linked her line of clothing to sweatshop conditions in the Honduran countryside, and he would like to soil the entire apparel industry with a similar smudge of shame.

One of Kernaghan’s aims is the independent inspection of garment factories, allowing human rights groups to monitor the treatment of workers, much like the manufacturers oversee quality control. Last year, a campaign against The Gap forced that retailer to accept this kind of oversight.

Another objective is to raise pay, demanding “a living wage” instead of each nation’s paltry, often erratically enforced minimum wage: “Look at these companies’ profits, look at their executives’ salaries. It’s a moral issue. Why should people have to work for starvation wages?”

Early this month, Kernaghan made the latest of several trips to Haiti, attempting to gather embarrassing evidence against one of the few American icons more famous than Kathie Lee, that purveyor of family values and friendly dreams, the Walt Disney Co. “Can you think of a better target?” he said.

A most reluctant quarry, Disney has been loath to comment about Kernaghan’s activities. The company licenses the use of its name, animated characters and other properties to manufacturers; in 1996, this will earn the company nearly $1 billion in revenue, estimates Jill Krutick, an analyst for the Smith Barney Inc. investment firm. Hundreds of Disney licensees employ factories around the globe; two of them use Haitian facilities for making clothing.

For a crusader such as Kernaghan, the contradiction of images is irresistible, the wholesomeness of the Magic Kingdom against the toil of the Haitian poor: Disney is supposed to side with Cinderella, not the wicked stepsisters.

But the ways of the world are complicated--and that most surely includes the apparel business, where profit margins are figured to the fraction of a penny. Cost analyses of that $10.97 T-shirt include the licensing, fabric, cutting, dyes, screen printing, packaging, freight, warehousing, entry fees, advertising, floor space, sales clerks. There are variously paid workers at every step--and who would want to give up some of their share?

What’s more, a global economy merely extends the same unforgiving supply-and-demand laws that affect regional and national labor markets: As always, plentiful labor lacks the necessary leverage to command high pay.

Unemployment in Haiti is about 70%, and jobs in the garment factories are better than no jobs at all. If wages creep too high, manufacturers simply will move to another steamy reservoir of the Third World unemployed.

Charlie Kernaghan’s new target may be the Walt Disney Co., but his argument is with capitalism itself.

*

Capitalism is precisely what Kernaghan does not understand, complain the Haitian factory owners. “I operate a business, not a charity,” said Marie-Claude Bayard. “All we have to offer is our cheap labor,” said Georges Sassine. “Our workers are weak and anemic and produce only 60% of what workers sew in the U.S.,” said Marie-Louise Baker.

This is not a nation that ticks along like clockwork. There are 60,000 phone lines for 7 million people. The power company produces only six to eight hours of electricity a day for the capital--and none for rural areas. Potholes in the few highways can swallow a motorcycle whole. Port charges are outrageous, to say nothing of the necessary bribes. The labor code is a mystery; there is even disagreement about the dates of national holidays.

In 1991, Haiti’s garment factories employed 60,000 people. Now--after five years of coups and trumped-up governments, terror and mutilated corpses, embargoes and a restoration of democracy--the industry has cautiously reappeared with 17,000 jobs. “These factories are our only ray of hope,” Sassine said. “At least it’s a start toward building an industrial base.”

With times so uncertain, the presence of the troublemaker Kernaghan was not welcomed by the bourgeoisie. The mere mention of his name made faces erupt red-hot. What were his real motives, business people wanted to know.

Since January, Kernaghan has issued two reports about Haiti, the prose sensational with talk of dimly lit, sweltering factories; supervisors who forced themselves on female workers; dead rats floating in the drinking water. The Walt Disney Co. is mentioned with reproach at every opportunity.

This “research” combines some good work with exaggerations and flimsily supported accusations. As Kernaghan would admit, workers rights is a war requiring guerrilla tactics. He thinks his job is to get people’s attention. “Charlie likes to instigate, and he’s quite good at putting companies on the defensive,” said Pharis Harvey, head of another workers-rights group.

Disney’s task, on the other hand, was to somehow reverse the spin. In brief public statements, the company was indignant, using its own slender evidence to declare the Haitian factories A-OK, even insisting that workers were paid double and triple the minimum wage, itself a stunning exaggeration.

Behind the scenes, Disney was not so confident of the facts. Its two American licensees doing business in Haiti--L.V. Myles Inc. and H.H. Cutler Co.--were urged to inspect their Haitian subcontractors with unprecedented thoroughness. Finally, in May, Disney sent down an investigator of its own.

“We won’t be making our investigator available to the press,” said spokesman Tom Deegan, continuing Disney’s guarded comments. “We believe our licensees are managing their manufacturing operations in a responsible manner.”

The visits of so many snoopers has exasperated the factory owners. “Who wants to live under such scrutiny,” Bayard said. “The man from Disney looked like FBI or CIA, asking to see the books, asking to see the payroll. ‘How do I know the workers actually got paid?’ he asked me. I had to show him where they signed for the money.”

All because of that annoying Kernaghan. And now he was back.

*

The owners had never met the man--and they were curious. When people from American companies or the U.S. Embassy wanted to check out the factories, they usually questioned only the bosses, then blithely accepted the answers.

Kernaghan did things the opposite way. “Who needs the owners to blow smoke at you?” he said. “I talk to the workers. I go to their homes and see how they live. What you really need to know is the truth of peoples’ lives.”

Wealthy Haitians suspected he was on someone’s payroll, maybe foreign rivals, maybe U.S. labor unions. They also weighed the possibility that he was yet another do-gooding zealot--and that loomed as perhaps the worst prospect of all. Haiti once made most of the world’s baseballs. Then a group of well-intentioned Catholics, Pax Christi, waged a campaign about conditions in the plants and the embattled industry scurried off to Costa Rica.

These days, the owners were reading up on Kernaghan, filing newspaper clippings in Manila folders. They knew he was executive director of the New York-based and formidably named National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America.

What they did not realize was that this mouthful of an organization was a hyperactive runt. Kernaghan has only a two-person staff and a puny budget of $250,000. He inherited the burdensome name 10 years ago and seems stuck with it. The word “labor” makes most foundations ill-disposed to giving it grants; the words “human rights” turn off all but a few unions.

Kernaghan himself is an odd champion. At 48, he is tall, bearded man with a paunch and the preoccupied manner of a science professor. His sister has to buy his clothes or else he comes home with the wrong sizes.

Formerly a photographer, he became interested in workers rights a decade ago during a trip to El Salvador. But he is no globe-trotting superman. Traveling makes him ill, each trip a misadventure of fevers and intestinal upheaval. Articulate in English, he is impervious to any other language. He once tried to order a drink in Prague and ended up with bacon and eggs.

His strength is in his tirelessness, a seven-days-a-week devotion to a single cause. He has the noble-minded passion of a Ralph Nader “Why do we have to accept the system the way it is?” Kernaghan asked in Haiti. “Corporations always say they have to hold down wages like it was some natural law. Well, people are willing to pay a premium for Disney clothes.

“Why couldn’t Disney ask rights groups to establish a reasonable living wage in every country and then make paying that wage a part of its licensing agreements? Either pay the workers--or don’t use Pocahontas. What a statement for human life that would be, what an affirmation of family values.”

*

A scholar would look skeptically at the way Kernaghan gathers much of his information. For three days, he stood at a roadside, stopping workers as their shifts ended. Translating for him was Yanique, the nom de guerre of a Haitian woman trying to start a militant labor federation. A documentary film crew worked away, donating its time to record all the fact-finding scenes.

“Do you think you’re paid a fair wage?” Kernaghan shouted. “What would happen if you tried to start a union? Do the bosses treat you with respect?”

He summoned the glum like a carnival barker: Step right up, folks, and complain about your jobs! And complain some did. Although most workers warily stepped away, there was always enough of a crowd for a powerful sideshow of discontent: After they pay us, we can’t afford to eat; they fire us for no reason; they curse us; “they suck our lives away like we are Popsicles.”

Kernaghan would pull Disney clothing from a nylon bag as the workers pointed to the familiar: I made this! Yes, the 101 Dalmatians, that’s me!

“Do you know how much these Pocahontas pajamas cost in America?” he would ask, pausing for effect. “350 gourdes [15 gourdes equals $1 U.S.]”

“No!” people shouted. “That can’t be. It’s a fortune.”

“Do you know that the Disney company says you earn 108 gourdes a day?”

“No! They tell lies!”

There was a cadence to this give-and-take, a crescendo of leading questions and then a rat-tat-tat of answers. Individuals volunteered their personal tales of poverty and mistreatment.

Then, inevitably, there was a show-stopping moment. For this, Kernaghan would raise his voice a notch. “Do you know that Michael Eisner, the man who runs Disney, has earned as much as 1,455,000 gourdes an hour?”

Haitian culture has a place for many unusual and haunting beliefs: witchcraft, zombies, potions. But this sum of money seemed even beyond a sorcerer’s power.

People pondered the bizarre possibility in chilly silence.

Such wealth was altogether incomprehensible: It must be voodoo economics.

*

Most factories here making Disney clothes are in hangar-like buildings. They are neither decrepit nor filthy; most certainly, they are not the cramped nether worlds commonly found in New York and Los Angeles, with an illegal immigrant exploited behind every bobbin.

If anything, the plants--equipped with large fans, running water, sturdy roofs, reliable light--are notable for their contrast to workers’ crumbling shanties.

Indeed, the most pitiable things about garment work in Haiti are not the physical conditions, but how hard it is to get a job and to keep it and to make it pay more than the parsimonious minimum wage of 36 gourdes a day.

In most places, bonuses are given for extra production but the quotas are often set insatiably high. “I’m supposed to make 180 dozen, but my machine isn’t very good and the thread keeps breaking,” said Jocelyne Jean-Pierre.

Jean-Pierre is a pseudonym, providing cover to a mother of three small children who took a big risk by taking a reporter to her home. Neighbors occasionally tattle, and some factory owners frown on such openness. Workers are frightened. One woman recently was fired for being hospitable to a newsman. Others were let go for speaking with Kernaghan on his last trip. Similarly, jobs are jeopardized by any display of interest in labor unions.

“We are lucky to have such a good house,” said Jean-Pierre, 36, by way of beginning a tour of her 12-foot-by-12-foot home. It has a concrete floor and a low tin ceiling. The rent is $330 a year, more than half her annual income.

As for being “lucky,” that is because the one-room refuge is larger than most; by her standards, it easily accommodates herself, her husband, a teenage niece and the three children. Two beds fit inside, though one is a danger zone of protruding springs and cannot be used for sleeping. At night, four of them arrange themselves like jigsaw puzzle pieces on the floor.

Their relative luxury of space allows them to keep four water buckets in a corner. They have fashioned a closet by hanging a bed sheet over some shelves. A small kitchen table with a yellow vinyl cloth sits in the room’s center.

If there is a drawback to this lucky home, it is the porous wall it shares with an outhouse, a stall with a square hole used by the Jean-Pierres and six other families. The odor can be abominable, offending all nearby but the abundance of roaches--big as clothes pins--that skitter purposefully in the infernal heat.

*

Garment work offers more than an income. It makes a person a better credit risk, no small thing in the hemisphere’s poorest nation, where debt is the only lifeline from financial undertows. People owe Jean-Pierre money, just as she owes her relatives, her friends and her boss. She is a regular at the pawn shop down the street. They are holding her best cooking bowl, a bedsheet with no holes and one of the two plastic tubs she uses to wash clothes.

Jean-Pierre’s husband has not worked in years, which is not at all remarkable with unemployment so high. To assuage his guilt, he attempts to scavenge from his dreams the numbers he plays in the lottery. “Maybe the lottery makes as much sense as working,” Jocelyne said in Creole. “I bring home so little money for so much work. I am so depressed at times I want to die. But if I die, what happens? My children will be out in the street.”

Without a juggling of debts there is no way for her to make it. Prices are impossibly steep compared to her 36 gourdes of daily wages: a pound of sugar, 5 gourdes; an 8-ounce can of beans, 8 gourdes; a roll of toilet paper, 12 gourdes; a small tin of pasteurized cheese, 22 gourdes. Most days, the family gets by on a pot of rice, seasoned with tomato paste or bouillon cubes.

In Haiti, the public hospitals are asylums of want. Patients are expected to bring their own medications, syringes, even blood for transfusions. Jean-Pierre knows the system well. She stores a sorrow within her like a message in a bottle. Four years ago, in the middle of the night, she carried her baby to the hospital, a 3-month-old daughter withering before her eyes with chronic diarrhea. She could not afford the basic elixirs to rehydrate the girl.

“We had no money to bury the baby, so we left her in the hospital for disposal,” she said. “A lot of people asked us, ‘Aren’t you going to have a funeral?’ We wanted to. It was very hard. But we had no money. Sometimes you just have to resign yourself to things. We had no money.”

*

Yes, it is all sadly true, said factory owner Georges Sassine: “The Haitian people have been dealt a bad hand. But I am not responsible. Without me, without Walt Disney, without Wal-Mart, these workers have nothing.”

Like nearly all the owners, Sassine is part of the nation’s mixed-race elite, most of them educated in the United States, Canada or France. His office has a computer and an air conditioner. Green Bay Packers memorabilia decorate the walls.

“I am the first to say that people cannot live on the minimum wage. I would like to pay my workers 10 times more. It would take the pressure off me. As it is, I am the father, the doctor and godfather to 400 people.

“But things don’t work like that. If we raised wages even a few cents an hour, it would add $5 to a garment at the retail level. Who’s going to pay?”

However questionable that arithmetic--and experts would find it far-fetched--Sassine’s opinion has influence. He is a member of the Tripartite Commission, appointed last year by then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to calculate a new minimum wage and, when necessary, adjust it.

At one point, Aristide--the frail priest who became a messiah figure to the masses--had spoken of raising the 15-gourde minimum then in place to 60 or more. Businessmen on the commission, according to Sassine, believed that 25 was more realistic if Haiti was to undercut international competition. Labor union representatives suggested 30.

The commission reached a compromise at 29, only to have Aristide set the wage at 36. At first, this new scale alarmed employers. But inflation was quickly swallowing up the gourde. “The 36 is now worth less than the original 15,” Sassine said. Still, the commission has shown no interest in raising the wage again. “That would bring more inflation.”

Of course, such complicated economics are beyond the average Haitian’s understanding, Sassine said. “So when some white guy like Kernaghan asks them if they’re paid unfairly, do you think they are going to say no?”

Factory owners have problems an outsider cannot even imagine, he lamented: fickle generators, out-of-repair sewing machines, cloth with tints that do not quite match. And the workers! “They are always trying to take advantage of me.” Some steal, stuffing garments beneath their shirts in the bathrooms. He now locks up the indoor lavatories, requiring his employees to attend to their bodily urgencies in outside facilities, only one person at a time.

A man sits out there watching. He hands out a short ration of toilet paper and, if absolutely necessary, a sanitary napkin. “Here again they take advantage,” Sassine said, “I tell them, ‘OK, maybe today you didn’t know your period was coming, but tomorrow you’d better bring your own, please.’ ”

*

As usual Kernaghan had made no plans to talk with any owners. But this time he agreed to meet with Bayard after a reporter independently set it up. The session lasted 2 1/2 hours, with four other owners arriving unannounced, all there to set this interloper straight. Here is part of their exchange:

Kernaghan: Let me assure you, we want jobs to remain in Haiti. Our goal is human rights. People in the U.S. aren’t interested in buying clothing that’s made by exploited labor. Haitians can’t live on 36 gourdes.

Michel Liautaud: It’s unfair to single out Haiti. Every country has a different reality. The U.S. minimum wage is not as good as Germany’s.

Kernaghan: But Haiti’s minimum wage is not a living wage--and workers need to be treated with decency. Your workers present a far different picture of their jobs than you do. Our experience is that workers speak openly only if they can be sure of no repercussions. We propose independent monitoring.

Liautaud: You’ll send in a priest. What does he understand of business?

Bayard: He may tell me to pay my workers 50 gourdes apiece.

Liautaud: It’s the job of our government to make our laws and be sure they are being obeyed, not someone from the outside. There is a Ministry of Social Affairs. Why don’t you use this body? It’s already there.

Bayard: Haitian laws are enforced, and, believe me, the worker here is very aware of his rights. They’re supposed to give you two-months notice [before quitting]. But you train them and then they run off. Isn’t this a human rights violation against management? Why don’t you look into this, Mr. Kernaghan?

Haitian democracy is in its infancy, not walking yet, not even crawling. Members of Parliament still are waiting to get desks and telephones. The government is trying to sell off the public utilities. A police force has been started from scratch. The United Nations deploys 1,300 baby-sitting soldiers.

Many people had expected to simply levitate out of poverty with the return of Aristide in October 1994 after three year in exile. The masses were rapturous. They swept the streets and fashioned shrines out of palm fronds and flowers. Last February, as his term expired, Aristide handed over the presidency to agronomist Rene Preval. The presumed levitation had yet to take place. Haitians were as poor as ever, this time with a difference. They had unwrapped their gift of hope and found nothing to hold onto inside.

Weighed down with disappointment, the people still do not feel that the power of government is an ally. Where are the public rights that can overcome the private wrongs? Who looks out for the poor?

To enter the Ministry of Social Affairs, a worker would have to pass the cadavers of several cars dissected near the gate. The building is dim, when lit at all. Little work is going on. In an occasional office someone can be found asleep.

A few officials have heard of Kernaghan. In fact, his reports have caused enough of a to-do that it has prodded them to inspect factories. This work has been frustrating, however.

“Our needs are enormous,” said Sobner Jean-Baptiste, Haiti’s director of labor. “We don’t have any cars. We have no way to get places.”

Wistfully, he tried to enlist Kernaghan’s assistance. “If your organization could give a little push for our ministry to function normally, it would be to everybody’s advantage,” the director implored.

*

Kernaghan--and other workers-rights activists--are tinkering with a fragile mechanism. “No one wants to see his name in the newspaper as an abuser of the poor. What if the American companies leave?” asked Jean-Edouard Baker, president of a Haitian government commission on the economy. Georges Sassine said, “If a Disney or Wal-Mart would say, ‘OK, no more Made in Haiti labels,’ imagine the consequences. Mr. Kernaghan is playing with peoples’ lives.”

Right now, Haiti offers the hemisphere’s lowest wage, but labor costs in Honduras, El Salvador and other countries are not that much higher. Besides, corporate production decisions are based on many factors, including delivery time and reliability. Haiti’s big drawback is its political instability. Does a retailer want to risk its spring season on an assassin’s bullet?

These days, retailers drive the apparel industry. Before, “manufacturers would make garments and ‘push’ them into the market,” said Manuel Gaetan, the publisher of the U.S. magazine Bobbin. “Now, the retailer ‘pulls’ the merchandise. He says, ‘I want 50,000 of these pajamas. I want to sell them at $12. Can you make them for me [for $6]?’ ”

If agreeable, a manufacturer can produce the pajamas itself or subcontract the work to others, oftentimes modest factories in the Third World. These smaller subcontractors rely on low wages and cheap overhead to offset their slower production rates.

Whatever the garment--whether an easily-made T-shirt or a hard-to-assemble ski parka with zippers and snaps--the amount paid to the people at the sewing machines is almost always only a fraction of the eventual price.

Kernaghan’s solution for depressed wages, then, is to urge someone along the line to forgo some profits, perhaps the retailer setting the prices--or maybe a corporation such as Disney that enjoys a bonanza in licensing fees.

But such notions are unlikely to enthrall profit-sensitive stockholders--that is, unless socially-conscious consumers are willing to make up for lost earnings. Indeed, this is the concept behind proposals for “no sweatshop” labels. People would pay extra for clothes made in some approved way, much as they preserve trees by buying recycled paper at a premium.

The Haitian factory owners also could show some profit-sharing benevolence, Kernaghan insists; they could simply raise pay to a more livable income.

But can the owners afford it? According to one source intimate with the operations of the Haitian factories, there is some “give” in the wages:

“But if things went up [as much as] 10 cents [an hour], I think they’d lose their business. And you’d be asking people who take great risks to manufacture in Haiti to give up profits out of the goodness of their hearts.

“You’d be changing the entire structure of capitalism.”

*

Back in New York, Charlie Kernaghan began the National Labor Committee’s “official” campaign against Disney by standing before The Disney Store on Fifth Avenue, making anti-Disney remarks to complete his anti-Disney video.

As people gathered around, he gave one of his familiar sermons, half gritty truth, half reckless bombast, pulling his Disney clothes from the nylon bag:

“Haitian workers are working for starvation wages, being screamed at, humiliated, treated like dirt. We’re asking Disney to make a trip with us to Haiti and speak with the workers in a place where people won’t be punished.”

One of those listening was a tourist with a toddler in a stroller, Doris Greener of Indianapolis. “You know, I’ll bet the man is right,” she said, for a few seconds biting her lip. Then, after this hesitation, she headed into the store where she knew she’d find “absolutely great things to buy.”

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.