Violence isn’t our only concern, however. There are many challenges ahead of us (for details about those in our schools, read Christine Rockey’s article on page 13), and one affects not Americans, but Nicaraguans. Yet it’s our responsibility.

If you shopped at Kohl’s, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, or J.C. Penney, it’s likely that the jeans you bought your kids were made by Nicaraguan hands, hands of women who are paid approximately 20 cents for every pair of pants they sew. That translates to about $65 a month — not even enough to buy food for the family. It’s about one-third of their cost of living. As a result, they take on long overtime hours, while being pushed to make unrealistic production goals. That brings their monthly wages up to about 60 percent of their cost of living.

The Taiwanese consortium which owns several factories in the area has raised wages at all of its factories except Chentex, a plant where 1,850 textile workers produce 20,000 to 25,000 pairs of jeans a day. Chentex just happens to be the only factory where workers have a contract and a union. Most of the workers there are women, just like the girls who worked twelve hour days at the textile mills in
New England at the turn of the last century, before unions put an end to that exploitation.

That was then in the U.S. It’s now in Nicaragua.

Five textile unions in the Las Mercedes area have been destroyed in the last six months, according to the National Labor Committee. The employers will work the women to the proverbial bone as long as they possibly can. Then, the management — guaranteed — will pull up stakes and take their abuse elsewhere.

And there will be one fewer employer in Nicaragua.

The workers themselves have written a letter "To the American People," an "Urgent Call from Nicaragua for Solidarity." "This is really a life or death struggle," reads the letter, signed by the fired Chentex union officers. "We have exhausted almost all recourses and possibilities in Nicaragua. That is why we find ourselves obligated to seek international support … We don’t want investment to leave Nicaragua. We want the jobs, but with dignity and fair wages. Chentex should stay in the country, but should reinstate us in our jobs, end the threats and sit down to negotiate in good faith with the union. We ask you to pressure the North American companies …"

Recently, a handful of concerned Central Pennsylvanians gathered to protest outside the opening of a new Kohl’s Department Store in Harrisburg, off Jonestown Road. Many protestors in Milwaukee have done the same. The bad press has begun to force Kohl’s hand; Kohl’s recently stated that they’re "looking into" the situation at the factory and will act accordingly, as they do maintain criteria for companies with whom they do business, such as workers must not be at risk of personal harm, must be treated and compensated fairly, and are allowed the right of free association.

But as the history of unionization in Lowell, Massachusetts, has taught us, we can’t always trust corporate America to police itself. Only more protests and boycotts will show these retailers that we consumers mean business.

Somebody must be held accountable. We Americans don’t make our own clothes anymore; that in itself is a sad tale. But we’re not in the Emperor’s new clothes, either. And the very real people who are making our very real garments are working in conditions we Americans would never tolerate. Is it too much to ask Americans to spend what the jeans are really worth, so that the women who make them can feed their children? If not, we’re no better than the mill bosses of 1900.

Exploitation is exploitation.

Read on.

Lisa E. Paige, Ph.D.