Garment Industry Problems Not Affecting Holiday Sales

In the year of Kathie Lee Gifford and Guess and Disney, were shoppers thinking about sweatshops and child labor scandals when they hit the stores this holiday season?

Lisa Hunt and Ronnel Jones professed to be. The Garden Grove housewives, dragging their young children through Main Place in Santa Ana, said they made a point this year of buying American-made goods.

But when Jones checked the tag on a winter-white spandex top Hunt had purchased at Target for the holidays, she was taken aback.

“Macau!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never heard of that place.”

With the retailer’s critical holiday season coming to a close, industry experts and shoppers suggest that the garment industry’s highly visible problems left little lasting impression at the checkout.

Robert Kahn, retail newsletter publisher based in Lafayette, Calif., said the issues were too confusing to move a jaded public. “There’s no way for anyone to know whether an item was made in a sweatshop or not,” he said.

“Shoppers don’t care,” added Carl Steidtmann, an economist in charge of Price Waterhouse’s retail consulting division in New York. Steidtmann’s annual fall poll of 4,000 U.S. households nationwide reconfirmed results of past surveys indicating that price is always the top criterion when buying a garment, followed by the fit, the quality and a retailer’s return policy.

This year, as before, said Steidtmann, fewer than 10% mentioned an item’s origin.

Clearly, retiring Labor Secretary Robert Reich was in the minority as he shopped at the last minute for clothing for his wife. He said he took along his department’s “trendsetter” list of retailers and apparel makers who’ve committed to monitor their contractors for sweatshops.

“I don’t expect that every consumer did what I did,” Reich said. “I have become especially sensitized to this, because I’ve actually seen sweatshops.”

Charles Kernaghan predicts it’ll be a decade, if ever, before changes in consumer purchasing show up. Kernaghan is executive director of the National Labor Committee, the tiny New York-based human rights’ group that drew media attention to allegations that some of the apparel carrying the Gifford and Disney names were made in overseas sweatshops. The talk show host promised to more closely monitor her clothing line, while the entertainment giant is investigating the allegations.

“Frankly, the ultimate question is whether shining light on these issues is having an effect on the pocketbook, where shoppers shop, and on companies,” Kernaghan said.

He believes that the American public remains largely uninformed.

A recent national survey suggested that Americans want to do the right thing--they would rather shop at stores working to end abuse of garment workers.

Eighty-three percent of the 1,023 adults polled by Arlington, Va.-based Marymount University said they’d pay an additional $1 on a $20 item if they knew the garment wasn’t made in a sweatshop. Nearly four in five said that if they knew a retailer sold sweatshop-made garments, they’d avoid shopping there. But retailing experts say shoppers aren’t necessarily doing what they say.

National associations of retailers and apparel makers, as well as individual companies singled out for alleged use of sweatshop labor such as Guess Inc. and Walt Disney Co., say Christmas sales have been brisk this year, compared with last, and apparel is especially strong.

But Glenn A. Weinman, general counsel for Guess, says that even at stores where union organizers have demonstrated, including those in Beverly Hills and Sherman Oaks, sales are up over last year.

However, David Young, director of the Union of Needle Trades, Industrial and Textile Employees’ organizing project, says the union’s campaign is having more of an effect than the company acknowledges. Young says the company claims in court actions that union demonstrations are hurting sales and seeks millions of dollars of damages.

Retailing experts say it was virtually impossible for the average budget-minded shopper to make a politically correct gift list this season. Not only do many developing nations have poor working conditions and child labor problems, but retailers offer few U.S.-made alternatives at reasonable prices.

Even Maria Echaveste, the Labor Department’s wage-and-hour administrator, is unsure where to shop.

Echaveste, while stepping up enforcement actions against garment industry sweatshops, has renewed her own passion for needlework. Yet, she knows she won’t have time before Christmas to finish the sweaters she’s been knitting for her two young nieces. So, when she visits her family in Oxnard and South Pasadena over the holidays, where will she get her last-minute gifts?

“Six years ago, when I was in the L.A. garment district, [we’d] go to discount stores,” she said. “Now it’s much harder to shop, because I know much more about the industry.”