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[tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

tvoivozhd---societies frozen for thousands of years in a vicious, 
backward patriarchal system are transformed when women attain economic 
power and primary control over the family. 


chicagotribune.com <http://www.chicagotribune.com/>       


 Quotas go; breadwinner jobs likely to follow in poor lands

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By Evelyn Iritani, Marla Dickerson and Tyler Marshall, Tribune 
Newspapers: Los Angeles Times. Iritani reported from Lesotho, Dickerson 
from El Salvador and Marshall from Cambodia

January 30, 2005

MASERU, Lesotho -- Alice Foulo Ntoi's job as a seamstress pays enough to 
support her husband, her four children, her mother and her two nieces. 
It also protects her from AIDS.

Nurses at the factory where Ntoi works give her free condoms and medical 
counseling. The factory owner, Shinning Century Ltd., sells her vitamins 
at a discount.

For Shinning Century, it's not charity. In a country where more than 40 
percent of young women are infected with the AIDS virus, protecting them 
means protecting the assembly lines of 48,000 factory workers who keep 
the Lesotho apparel industry humming. If it weren't for the factories 
turning out T-shirts and jeans for people in North America and Europe, 
Lesotho's AIDS crisis might well be worse.

Now the factories are threatened by the expiration of import quotas that 
for 30 years helped poor countries--and poor women--take part in the 
global economy.

The last of the quotas expired in early January, but the jobs began 
disappearing last spring. Since November, six factories have closed, 
leaving 5,600 apparel workers without paychecks. Other factories have 
reduced hours because there weren't any orders. At Shinning Century, the 
overtime work dried up.

Ntoi, like many women here the sole breadwinner in her family, expects 
the worst.

"If these factories close down, many bad things will happen," she said 
from her two-room cement-block house that does not have electricity, 
heat or running water. "How will we survive?"

The social and economic implications of the end of quotas are enormous, 
in large part because women make up the bulk of the workforce in the 
apparel manufacturing industry. And in the developing world, women's 
paychecks have been a driving force behind significant gains in living 
standards, health indicators and educational levels.

Nobody in the global trade community is sure how many people will be 
thrown out of work in countries that, unprotected by quotas, won't be 
able to compete for contracts for cotton sweat shirts or men's dress 
slacks. It could take years to sort out.

But so many factories have already shut down--hundreds in the last year 
in countries such as Mauritius, El Salvador and Bangladesh--that 
forecasters talk in sweeping terms.

A conservative estimate is that hundreds of thousands of women will be 
thrown out of work. Although many millions more in China, India and 
elsewhere will gain jobs and economic power, that won't mitigate the losses.

"I'm a free trader at heart, and there are thousands and thousands of 
poor, illiterate Indian women who will benefit," said Isobel Coleman, a 
senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "But the transition 
costs are very, very painful."

For women in Lesotho, the grinding hours pushing cloth through sewing 
machines are preferable to the alternatives: migrating to South Africa, 
selling snacks or bartering for sex acts.

Thanks to her salary of $120 a month including overtime, Ntoi has been 
able to send her son to school, a feat in a country where the jobless 
rate tops 50 percent. Late last year, her bosses warned that the daily 
production goal at the Taiwanese-owned factory--which also has been hit 
hard by currency fluctuations that have made exports more 
expensive--would have to climb sharply this year if Shinning Century is 
to survive. And Ntoi isn't sure she can squeeze more work out of the 29 
women she supervises.

"Sometimes I'm afraid that here in Lesotho, we are slower and the 
factories in China are faster," she said. "Why are they not getting 
very, very tired?"

When Asian apparel companies set up shop in quota-protected Bangladesh 
in the 1980s, they hired men to work the sewing machines.

That was appropriate in a patriarchal society with a preference for 
sons, where girls consume fewer calories and receive inferior treatment 
when they are ill, contributing to a high maternal mortality rate. Women 
are expected to marry young and deliver large dowries to their in-laws. 
The Islamic tradition of keeping women confined to their homes or under 
wraps while in public is common.

As late as 1993, the female share of the workforce was just 8 percent, 
according to the Asian Development Bank.

That soon began to change, largely because of a discovery the apparel 
companies made about men: They couldn't cope with the long hours, the 
monotony and the requirements for a quick turn of the cloth.

Over the objections of their husbands and fathers, Bangladeshi women 
moved into the factories. Trade experts had not foreseen that happening.

When the Multifiber Arrangement, as the quota system was called, was set 
up in the 1970s, the objective was to protect manufacturers in the 
United States, Canada and Europe from low-cost competition. But by 
setting annual limits on the amount of apparel and textile products that 
could be imported from any one country, manufacturing work was spread 
around the world.

That provided an unexpected boost for poor countries. Lesotho and 
Bangladesh were coveted, among others, because they had abundant, cheap 
labor along with valuable quota rights to export to the United States 
and Europe.

And women, with their nimble fingers and agility behind sewing machines, 
became the workers of choice.

Until recently, one of them was Ankhi Akhter, who shares a room with her 
uncle, his wife and two children in a two-story tenement.

Slender and bright-eyed, with six years of school behind her, Akhter 
came to Bangladesh's capital city from an outlying village six years ago 
at age 15. Her uncle agreed to take her in as long as she helped pay for 
the rent and food.

Akhter earned $50 a month sewing T-shirts. After giving her uncle $17 a 
month, she had enough left over for lunches, phone calls, clothing and 
occasional gifts. "My job meant a lot to me," she said. "In a way, it 
can be said it was my life."

In August, Amy Fashions, the factory where Akhter had worked for 18 
months, closed. Her uncle immediately cut down on the amount of food she 
was allowed to eat and told her that she would have to leave if she 
couldn't continue to help pay the rent.

Predictions that Bangladesh could lose as many as half of its 1.8 
million apparel jobs--85 percent of which are held by women -- is 
troubling to activists who have worked to change the status of women in 
this predominantly Muslim country.

Emboldened female garment workers in Bangladesh have resisted the 
efforts of conservative religious leaders to force them back into their 
homes. They have learned to read and write, sent their daughters to 
school and sparked a boom in the cosmetics industry.

Across the globe, women who work, and control their paychecks, are more 
likely than men to be the drivers of change for their families and 
communities. In Ivory Coast, expanding women's share of cash income 
significantly enlarged the share of the household budget going to food 
and decreased the amount spent on alcohol and cigarettes, according to a 
study published in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. In 
South Africa, cash received by women through an old-age pension program 
increased the funds spent on schooling and food for their grandchildren, 
a World Bank study showed.

Extra income in the hands of women in Brazil resulted in more of the 
household budget going to education, health and nutrition, according to 
a study by Duncan Thomas, an economics professor at UCLA. And when 
mothers' incomes were increased, their children grew taller and weighed 
more.

In Cambodia, money sent home by apparel workers--the vast majority of 
them women--has been spent on school fees and healthful food, aluminum 
roofs and cement-lined water wells.

The effect is immeasurable. Hun Srean, a 22-year-old who earns $3 to $4 
a day stitching men's shirts in Phnom Penh, supports two brothers and 
four sisters who live in the tiny southeastern village of Chreykrahim.

In El Salvador, no matter how fast she stitched, Juana Antonia Hernandez 
de Santos never made much above minimum wage, currently $5.04 a day for 
workers at factories that export.

Sometimes, her body ached from pushing fabric under the needle for as 
many as 17 hours a day, goaded by production goals.

But compared with the toil of cutting sugar cane, as Hernandez did when 
she was 18, sewing seemed easy. What's more, those jobs came with health 
insurance, and it was a way out.

"I didn't want to be a housekeeper like my mother," said Hernandez, 31, 
who lives in a one-room house with a corrugated metal roof, dirt floors, 
no plumbing and raw sewage running through the yard.

Last January, Hernandez was fired from the OrientalTex Co. factory 
because, she said, she had agitated for better pay and working 
conditions. The South Korean owners closed the factory last summer, 
putting 400 people out of work.

In a market flooded by an estimated 12,000 unemployed apparel workers in 
just the last year, Hernandez has been unable to find work. The $139 a 
month her husband brings home from his job at a clothing plant isn't 
enough to feed their three children.

Last hope is work in U.S.

So Hernandez has decided to head to the United States, where she is 
willing to take almost any job.

"Whatever there is. Washing clothes. Cleaning. Ironing. Caring for 
children," she said. "Anything short of prostitution."

Alice Foulo Ntoi has tested negative for HIV, but it's hard for her not 
to worry. Ntoi's brother-in-law died of complications from AIDS last 
fall. Her sister died of AIDS-related complications two years ago. At 
Shinning Century, the weekend funerals mount as the death toll 
accelerates: 11 in 2002, 17 the following year and 26 in 2004, according 
to the factory's manager.

In Lesotho, which has a population of about 2 million, more than 29,000 
people died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2003. But the statistics could 
become more harrowing.

At Shinning Century, Ntoi appreciates the discount on vitamins--$2 for a 
month's supply--because they "keep me strong." More important, she 
persuaded her husband, recently laid off from a gold mine in South 
Africa, to wear the condoms the factory dispenses to all employees.

That was no small victory in a society where women are legally 
subordinate to their husbands and fathers. The legislature is only now 
considering a law that would give married women control of property, 
inheritance and their bodies.

"Even though we work hard," Ntoi said, "the factory protects us."

By the laws of competitive advantage, an undeveloped country hundreds of 
miles from the nearest port shouldn't have an apparel industry. Lesotho 
does largely because of the African Growth and Opportunity Act of 2000, 
which was designed to stimulate the continent's poorest economies.

Factories doubled since 2000

After the act was passed, Washington removed most of the import 
restrictions on clothes made in Lesotho, and Asian manufacturers seeking 
access to the U.S. market poured into the country. In just three years, 
the number of apparel factories more than doubled to 50. And more than 
90 percent of the workers are women.

During the day, the dirt streets around Maseru's factories fill up with 
hundreds of people, mostly younger women, who have come into the city 
from their villages seeking work. Many sell fruit or snacks to the lunch 
crowd. Even those with jobs may end up engaging in what's known here as 
"transactional sex" to stretch their paychecks. A quick copulation in 
the back of a car buys them a ride home or a meal.

Last year, Jennifer Chen, Shinning Century's manager, joined with 
Lesotho's government and several AIDS advocacy groups to launch the 
country's first in-factory AIDS education and testing program. The U.S. 
government has given Lesotho $1 million to help fund AIDS testing 
centers and provide education.

Fighting AIDS and keeping women in the garment factories have become one 
and the same battle.

"There's no good in us saving our apparel industry if we have no 
workforce," said Mpho Malie, Lesotho's minister of trade and industry.

About one-half of the factory's 1,300 workers have been tested; at least 
30 percent are HIV positive. A factory nurse provides nutritional and 
health counseling and takes those who are ill to medical clinics where 
they can get anti-retroviral drugs and other treatment.

For Shinning Century to stay in the game now that the quotas have ended, 
Chen figures she will need to increase production by at least 30 
percent, a staggering goal even if one-third of the workforce wasn't 
ailing. She seeks compassion from an unlikely source.

"We are saying to China, `You are so big, you have already moved to 
higher products like electronics. Why do you need more? Please leave 
some opportunities for the least-developed countries.'"

----------

Third World finds ally in Gap

Once reviled as a perpetrator of sweatshop misery in the developing 
world, San Francisco-based Gap is now viewed as a leader in a small but 
growing corporate movement to improve conditions for the world's most 
exploited workers. MONDAY IN BUSINESS

Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune <http://www.chicagotribune.com/>