Why We Protest Disney

By Nino Selvaggio

United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) is an international student movement of campuses and individual students fighting for sweatshop free labor conditions and workers’ rights. Throughout the past academic year, the local ISU chapter of USAS has made and will continue to make their voice heard loud and clear by the Illinois State and surrounding communities regarding the groups staunch commitment to the eradication of sweatshop labor. USAS’s actions on ISU’s campus have received far-reaching media coverage. In fact, news of their activism has reached campuses across the U.S., from Los Angeles to Boston, equally concerned persons have contacted the group in order to express their support and appreciation for the group’s worker and human rights advocacy. Throughout the past year the local USAS group, for many reasons, has chosen Walt Disney Company, an identified sweatshop employer, as a main target. 

Why Disney? The National Labor Committee (NLC), a human rights advocacy group dedicated to promoting and defending the rights of workers, has been attempting to work with the Disney Company for the past six years in order to improve the conditions of the sweatshops where Disney products are manufactured. Charles Kernaghan, Executive Director of NLC, wrote a letter to Michael Eisner, Chief Executive Officer of Walt Disney Company. The reasons for the local USAS group to target Disney become exceedingly apparent upon reading Kernaghan’s remarks to Eisner. Below are some highlights from the March 4, 1999 letter:

“On the rare occasions that independent human rights organizations can actually locate specific factories in China where Disney toys, clothing and shoes are being made… evidence consistently emerges of serious human rights violations and sweatshop abuses. The longstanding systematic violations of human and worker rights at factories in China working under contract with Disney include: excessive forced overtime, up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, amounting to 112-hour work weeks; pitifully low wages (e.g. 12 ? cents an hour); no benefits;…workers being housed in primitive, crowded dorms—in one case eight women crammed into a tiny room measuring 5 by 10 feet;…and, most importantly, the repression, fear and total denial of worker rights.”

More recently, on March 24, 2001, the FBI uncovered a sweatshop that manufactures goods for Daewoosa Samoa Ltd. located in American Samoa. The FBI’s report details physical beatings, inhumane work conditions, and forced labor. According to the FBI complaint, the temperature in the plant reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit during work hours; worker were not paid for periods of three to six months; and they lived in barracks, 36 people to a room, in rooms described as wet, dirty, and rat-infested. Walt Disney Company is no exception to this trend of corporate exploitation of land and life—the employment of sweatshop labor.

Why sweatshop labor? Sweatshop labor is a result of a major guiding economic principle—maximize profits. What corporations don’t reveal is this goal is achieved at any cost, even at the expense of widespread human rights violations. Does responsible investing limit potential financial success? Geoffrey Heal, professor public policy and business responsibility at the School of Business at Columbia University, finds that ethical funds may in fact perform better than average. Socially responsible investors hope to do well by doing good. Socially responsible investing (SRI) is prevalent and growing in the US and trends appear to be similar in other markets. Already large enough to be influential, SRI funds could soon become a major factor in capital markets at anything like recent growth rates.

Economists might think that there would be a cost to the limitations imposed by an SRI approach. After all, they believe there are no freebies in a capitalist economy—everything and anything good comes at a cost. So SRI funds should in principle offer lower returns than those without any constraints on their portfolio choices. Surprisingly, this does not seem to be the case (Financial Times, July 2, 2001). In other words, consumers are making a statement against irresponsible business practices and aiding in the struggle to clean these practices up. While at the same time, corporations are still yielding profits.

Walt Disney Corporation’s use of sweatshop labor is unfortunately not a new phenomenon. For over a hundred years people have been struggling with corporations in order to ensure humane work conditions and work hours, livable wages, the freedom to organize, and so on. Alas, what we are seeing today in sweatshop labor employment is that it seems to be growing at an exponential rate. These “free trade” agreements, along with institutions like the World Trade Organization, enable multinational corporations such as Disney to exploit the land and life of people across the globe. Therefore, it is imperative that you know where your money goes and that we, as consumers, speak out against these serious injustices.