Sweatshop Scandals Leave Buyers Unfazed

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 MainPlace 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 picked up at Target for the holidays, she was taken aback.

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

With the retailers’ 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, a retail newsletter publisher in Lafayette, Calif., says 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 says. A nation that responded to student protests in the 1960s by eventually withdrawing from the Vietnam War no longer feels the “fire in the belly” for social causes, he says.

“Shoppers don’t care,” adds 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 year 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, says Steidtmann, fewer than 10% mentioned an item’s origin. Clearly, retiring Labor Secretary Robert Reich was in the minority as he last-minute shopped 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 says. “I have become especially sensitized to this, because I’ve actually seen sweatshops. I’ve been in them. I’ve talked to the workers.”

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Charles Kernaghan predicts it’ll be a decade, if ever, before changes in consumer purchasing show up.

Kernaghan is executive director of 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,” says Kernaghan.

He believes that the American public remains largely uninformed.

“If you go out now and ask the big question, you are asking the big question to people who don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he said.

If anything, says Mona Doyle, president of the Consumer Research Network in Philadelphia, shoppers are furious because they feel that somehow their refusal to pay top dollar for clothing is perceived as the cause of sweatshops and poor quality merchandise.

Doyle, who’s been polling consumers since 1980, says that in her national survey last month of more than 1,600 people, she detected for the first time an undercurrent of bitterness over such issues.

“They are going to off-price stores, spending as little as they can, and don’t want to feel guilty” for perpetuating the sweatshops, Doyle says.

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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 if they knew that 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 and Disney, say Christmas sales have been brisk this year, compared with last, and apparel is especially strong.

Guess, for instance, was downgraded on Reich’s trendsetter list and put on probationary status for ineffective monitoring of its contractors’ sewing shops.

But Glenn A. Weinman, the company’s general counsel, says even at stores where union organizers have demonstrated, including those in Beverly Hills and Sherman Oaks, sales are up over last year. Several shoppers even defied demonstrators by coming in to request a Guess bag, just so they could walk out with one, he says.

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However, David Young, director of the Union of Needle Trades, Industrial and Textile Employees’ organizing project, says the union’s campaign is having more effect than the company admits.

Young says the company claims in court actions that union demonstrations are hurting sales and seeks millions of dollars of damages.

“It drives them crazy,” Young contends. “We dry up their stores and after a while there’s nobody there.”

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 very few U.S.-made alternatives at reasonable prices.

Even the National Consumers League has resisted consumers’ pleas for its own “good guy” list of places to shop. The organization, founded in 1899 to attack sweatshop conditions and push for limits on child labor, reports 10 times the number of requests from consumers for such a list.

“We feel it’s a bit premature to develop that list at this point, because all companies need to make progress,” says Darlene Adkins, a league official.

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While she considers Reich’s trendsetter list “a good start,” she says, “the important thing to remember is that the trendsetter list doesn’t reflect a company’s business practices overseas, and sometimes that’s not clear.”

At MainPlace’s Disney store, Sam Roth, a Garden Grove executive shopping on his lunch hour, noted that many of the store’s items were made in China.

But Roth believes that many people reach a moral “comfort level” in which they justify buying items that might have been made under poor working conditions because the price is lower.

And even if they check the tags, shoppers don’t necessarily believe them.

Sergio Palacios was hunting last week for a holiday dress for his daughter in Fiesta Marketplace, the Santa Ana retail strip catering to a mostly Latino clientele. Palacios said a friend of his in Los Angeles earns his living sewing “Made in USA” labels on clothing made elsewhere.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s made in Mexico, or Singapore,” says Palacios. “They just change the label.”

Remarkably, store owners say that many of the shoppers who insist on buying American-made items are foreign tourists or immigrants returning to their homeland for the holidays.

Raymond Rangel, who owns R & R Sportswear at Fiesta Marketplace, noted how one young man last week paid $184 to buy five USA-made western-style shirts to take as holiday gifts to his future father-in-law in Mexico.

Also that day, Rangel said, a father and son dropped by to make their annual purchases of $350 Stetson hats for themselves before heading south for the holidays.

“We get a lot of tourists that come in from other countries,” Rangel says. “They want American goods, because they are better made. Better built.”

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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 says. “Now it’s much harder to shop, because I know much more about the industry.”