Corporate Responsibility Mondays.

We’re back with your weekly installment of Corporate Responsibility Mondays. Words of protest and pause in an age of consumerism. As always, Ariah does an excellent job with his thoughts in recommending an alternative to clothing. This week he highlights No Sweat Apparel.

This week’s company that I’m highlighting is J.Crew. I’ll have to admit that there was a time that I dabbled with “preppy”. Toyed with the idea of dressing like a polo player or nautical boater. It only lasted for a few minutes in college and probably had to do more with the girls I was interested in at that time. But it was nonetheless one of my less memorable phases.

While relatively small by most clothing stores standards, J. Crew still accounts for $800 million in clothing sales per year with over 8,200 employees. Even considering that most everything is at least $50, that is still a lot of sales. When a company has jeans on sale at $100+ and plastic flip-flops starting at $29.95 . . . there are probably some misplaced ethics in the global market.

Sweatshop Labor: J. Crew has been cited for the use of sweatshop labor, with the most publicized case involving sweatshop workers in the US territory of Saipan (this case involved indentured servitude and human rights violations at the Saipan Plant). Besides reaching a settlement in that particular case, J. Crew has shown little effort to stop the abuse of workers in its supply chain.

The Saipan Case is detailed as followed . . .

Thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean lie a chain of fourteen islands called the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. On the main island of Saipan, a garment industry has been booming since the 1980s. Over 30 garment factories employ more than 10,000 workers, almost all young women from China, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Bangladesh and other Asian countries. Saipan’s $1 billion garment industry has been plagued with media exposes of slave-like conditions and forced abortions. Government reports have documented food poisonings and millions of dollars in unpaid wages. In 1999, former and current garment workers, together with Sweatshop Watch, the Asian Law Caucus, Global Exchange and UNITE, filed three separate lawsuits against top U.S. clothing companies to clean up the rampant sweatshop abuses in Saipan. In September 2002, after more than three years of hard-fought litigation, 26 of America’s biggest clothing retailers and 23 garment manufacturers reached a landmark settlement in the Saipan sweatshop lawsuits. In April 2003, the settlement received final court approval, creating a $20 million fund to pay back wages to 30,000 workers and develop an independent monitoring system to ensure compliance with strict labor standards and an end to sweatshop abuse. (source: SweatShopWatch)

Animal Abuse:
J. Crew stores have introduced fur products such as fur boots, shoes, and coats. In order to get the fur, they buy from fur farms that violently abuse and torture their victims. They set painful traps. Underwater traps kill beavers by drowning them. Other traps cause animals to dehydrate and starve to death. If the animal is lucky enough to survive the traps, his luck is over. The victim is then taken to the fur farm and stuffed in an extremely small cage with more animals already inside it. Many of these animals are driven insane by the captivity they experience. They aren’t used to cages seeing as how they were taken out of the wild. They pace frantically and sometimes eat their cagemates. When the animal is chosen to be skinned, they are dragged out of their cages and outside, where the skinning takes place. Usually, if the animal is lucky, they are painfully electrocuted and killed before they are skinned. But in most cases, their necks are broken, leaving them fully conscious for the skinning process. The animal’s fur is then literally ripped of.

What happens to the animal? The animal is then thrown onto a pile of those who have gone before it, which can be up to 50 animals in one pile. Most animals are still alive, in extremely agonizing pain. They live through this pain for almost 15 minutes.

Progress:
J.Crew has on at least 3 occassions been a part of a class-action settlement with former garment workers. In a case in 1996 in Burma they broke off partnership with a factory known to be an advocate of sweatshop labor. The Saipan case in 2003 was also settled. And after receiving pressure from PETA, they temporarily discontinued the use of animal fur in their products. However, one has to ask the question as to how in all three cases did they have to wait until public pressure began to simmer to make changes? And why did they have to wait to go to court to settle lawsuits when they knew ahead of time of the complaints and were aware of the abuses?

One has to wonder if this habit of ignoring things until they are made public isn’t going on now. And only when they get caught will they make changes. That and $100 jeans are just stupid.

[tags]Corporate Responsibility, No Sweat Apparel, Sweat Shop Watch J. Crew[/tags]