Disney Sweatshops: The Dark Side of the Magic Kingdom

By Nick Berveiler

Imagine losing your job because you wanted more respect from your employer and better pay.
Imagine being forced to work 15 hours a day, 7 days a week from 8am to 11pm.
Imagine being cheated out of overtime wages.
Imaging being screamed at, slapped, and punched to work faster.
Imagine working in a hot, crowded and poorly ventilated factory with filthy and unsafe drinking water.
Imagine having no sick days, no healthcare, no pension and no daycare center for your children.
Imagine that you are working for Disney.

For women in Bangladesh who are mostly 16 to 25 years of age, this sweatshop nightmare is a reality.

With the assistance of the National Labor Committee, Bangladeshi women who have worked in labor intensive factories came to the United States in the fall of 2001 to demand that their rights be respected by US corporations. The focus of last year's campaign was to put pressure on universities who are purchasing Bangladeshi hats made in sweatshop conditions to improve working conditions. This campaign was successful in bringing communities together across the country who oppose miserable working conditions forced on workers abroad in developing countries. [Full Story]

Disney Values:

Questioning the Movie Ideology

Disney Mania has swept ISU campus, and many people - including myself - view this as a wonderful thing. Disney has had such an incredible influence on so many people, and we should really stop to celebrate why. Quite possibly the largest reason we should all praise Disney is their plethora of children's movies.

I personally love Disney movies because they present the world so accurately, in terms of black and white. There are no gray areas. Almost total realism is achieved. The "bad" guys always get what they deserve, and the Royalty is always just, fair, deserving, and capable.

Disney movies are necessary because they treat children like passive, unintelligent drones. After all, we all know that children are stupid, and cannot understand a world presented in anyway except in terms of "good" and "bad." Children cannot comprehend anything that is not over-simplified, Disney-fied, or white-washed. [Full Story]

Wal-Mart's War on Workers

From selling sweatshop products to creating urban sprawl, building stores with out of state, non-union labor or putting small businesses out of business, Wal-Mart has sparked the anger of many. The latest campaign against Wal-Mart is not much of a surprise as it relates specifically to Wal-Mart workers themselves over the issue of unionization.

The United Food and Commercial Workers are putting Wal-Mart's policies under scrutiny in what they call "Wal-Mart's War on the Workers" (www.walmartswaronworkers.com) which highlights testimony by Wal-Mart employees who have been victimized and former Wal-Mart management that has been ruthlessly anti-union (Union Free is the Wal-Mart way of saying it). Tactics by Wal-Mart include giving pay raises to employees who oppose unionization and cutting pay to workers who try to organize which obscures the benefits that unionization can provide for all employees. Testimony of abuse by Wal-Mart can be heard on a weekly radio show that is webcast and archived. Complaints by the National Labor Relations Board are also included and detailed. The list of complaints shows what sort of abuse Wal-Mart employees are confronted with if they try to organize a union. [Full Story]

Sweatin' to the Protests

It's remarkable to imagine that a group of college students could help change working conditions at factories around the world. Yet that's what happened when students protested the fact that apparel with their university's name on it could be made using sweatshop labor at Third World factories. Unlike the Vietnam Era, no one could accuse the students of simply being self-interested, or joining a protest because it's the trendy thing to do. Sweatshops were an entirely selfless cause.

The pressure was powerful enough that the sweatshop profiteers with the help of university administrators created an industry front group, the Fair Labor Association, supposedly to prevent these abuses. Even this was a small, but real, accomplishment. A bunch of liberals would have been satisfied. However, these students weren't. They started pressuring their colleges to reject the industry-supported group and instead endorse an alternative, independent certification organization, the Worker Rights Coalition (WRC). [Full Story]