Where Does This Stuff Come From?

Questions for this holiday season: What will Kathie Lee Gifford be putting under the tree for Frank? A hand-knitted sweater? Whose hand? Wow: How can they price those Pocahontas pajamas so low? What’s a suitable gift for a freshly downsized executive? Golf clubs? Arc-welding lessons? In what corner of the globe do they stitch together Tickle Me Elmos? Just what is it that consumers are supposed to guess about Guess? jeans? Santa’s elves: harmless fable or sweatshop metaphor?

Something new is ringing, however faintly, this December across the land of the free and the home of the mall. A fresh set of questions has begun to flicker in the collective brain of Shopping America:

Where does this stuff come from?

Under what conditions was it stitched, sewn, woven, assembled, molded?

Who did the work, and for what pay?

And, finally, who used to do the work--before the stuff-makers discovered that Haitians can work more cheaply than, say, Ohioans, and that a planet without national borders was a smaller, better and certainly more profitable world, after all?

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American auto workers, of course, have banged this gong for a long time. “Out of work?” goes the now faded bumper sticker. “Eat your foreign car.” And, interestingly enough, Japanese companies now advertise how some of their cars are put together in stateside plants. This latest round of the where-stuff-comes-from chorus, however, involves something more complicated than strictly us-vs.-them protectionism. Pieced together, it suggests a complicated and troublesome underside to all the rosy talk of Pacific Rims and shrinking planets.

It’s amazing how much has come out in just the past year or so. Most people engaged in what has been called the “fair trade” issue start connecting the dots with the discovery 14 months ago of a sweatshop in El Monte. Remember? Immigrant seamstresses were being kept as virtual slaves, making clothes to be sold at some of the brightest American department stores. That scandal was followed by another sensation, the operatic (soap division) public education of Kathie Lee Gifford.

Promptly added to the din was congressional testimony from Central American waifs who described the Dickensian horrors of sweatshops where they sew clothes for American companies. Unions and advocacy groups, sensing a sea change, began to push their campaigns against sweatshop competition even harder. Reporters started exploring the conditions under which everything from Barbie doll heads to Nike shoes to coffee beans to flannel shirts are produced overseas.

That such revelations came at a time when businesses were whacking jobs wholesale in the states was not seen by all as simple coincidence. Presidential candidates as diverse as Ralph Nader and Pat (“populists with pitchforks”) Buchanan found common ground questioning Corporate America’s loyalty to just plain old America. The staggeringly high salaries paid to some CEOs were held up for comparison to the staggeringly minuscule wages paid to those who produce the goods in factories and sweatshops from Indonesia to East Los Angeles.

Many dots. Many connections. Not a pretty picture.

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Perhaps, as retailers and manufacturers no doubt hope, public concern about where and how products are made will prove to be but a passing fancy--on par with such come-and-go issues as mink farm conditions. “This too shall pass,” said a lawyer for a designer jean company that has been ensnared in the sweatshop debate. He noted how difficult it has been to find parking lately at the malls--even those like the Beverly Center here, where union pickets have gathered often to protest clothing lines allegedly made in sweatshops. No, cash registers are ringing as merrily as ever.

At the same time, there is no denying that at least the question has been planted: Where does this stuff come from? Maybe it is not being asked by everybody. In fact, probably it is not even being asked by a majority. Still, it has been pushed into public play, and some of those engaged in the pushing are convinced they have started something powerful and lasting.

Kevin Danaher, co-founder of a San Francisco-based advocacy group called Global Exchange, compares it to consumer movements that, eventually, produced everything from nutritional labels on foodstuffs to mandatory automobile seat belts. He also recalls his days as a novice activist, leafleting American corporations that did business in South Africa: Everybody told him that would go nowhere, too.

“Part of what is going on with the sweatshops,” said Danaher, “is that this consumer awareness movement is confronting people with a choice: Exploitation or human rights? They are being asked: Which side do you want to put yourself on?”

And once the question is out there, the answer tends to take care of itself.