Africa’s Garment Sector: Making Suppliers Accountable

January 22nd, 2008

The demand for cheap production and quicker delivery of “brand” products to US markets is a well known strategy that multinational corporations impose on garments factories in Sub Saharan Africa. The pressure to produce cheaply and quickly is usually laid on factory workers who are forced to work at a faster rate under poor workplace health and safety conditions.

Speaking at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC, African labor organizers from Lesotho, Kenya and South Africa told the audience about hardships that garment workers endure to produce brand-name merchandize for U.S. customers at Gap Inc, Levi Strauss, Calvin Klein, and Jeanswear. Kids “R” Us, K-Mart, J.C. Penny and Wal-Mart have all also bought garments from Sub Saharan Africa.

Factory workers are subjected to long working hours and unpaid over-time, often working seven days a week. The wages are low, so workers have trouble paying their children’s schools fees and don’t have enough money for food and transport to work. The women workers are the most severely affected and this pushes them into prostitution where they are vulnerable to contracting HIV/AIDS.

Factory sites have poor health and safety standards, and there is no job security because many people are employed as casual workers. They are thus vulnerable to illegal dismissal and abuse by management. Trade union affiliation is discouraged, making it difficult for workers to petition any workplace complaint.

Garment and textile factories have cropped up across Sub Saharan Africa due to the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) which was signed in 2000. AGOA was an expansion of the US general system of trade preferences and authorizes the duty-free and tariff free export of products. Under this measure, an attempt to foster development on the continent, African producers enjoy special access to the US market including duty free and quota free access.

Despite the labor rights provisions in AGOA, enforcement of such rights typically is very weak for African factories exporting to the US market once African nations have eliminated all barriers to US trade and investments. The Uganda case of Tri Star is a case in point. Striking workers at this supplier to the US market were fired upon under a Presidential order because of fear that a strike would scare away investors.

With AGOA’s failure to protect African workers’ labor rights, it is important that new solutions be proposed to force garment manufacturers exporting to the U.S. market to follow International Labor Organization standards aggressively.

One such solution is to pass the legislation by U.S. Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA) called New Partnership for Development Act of 2007 (NPDA). This act, H.R. 3905 introduced on 18th October 2007, intends to support efforts to aid the world’s least developed nations. It also would reduce duties on imports from the world’s poorest countries, many of which are in Africa. The legislation provides capacity-building resources and creates incentives for sustainable economic growth such as making trade deals permanent.

This Act primarily targets countries that the United Nations identifies as “Least Developed” countries (LDCs). Important to factory workers, it would require recipient nations to adopt and maintain core labor rights as identified by the International Labor Organization. The AGOA labor rights provision is weak, unreliable and inadequate to protect working families in Africa. It fails to hold suppliers to the US market accountable for following internationally recognized labor standards. It is time to make globalization better by helping people move from these poor-paying and insecure jobs.

As members of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, the Oblate JPIC Office will continue to dialogue and file resolutions, calling on international corporations to hold accountable their suppliers from developing countries on labor rights to their employees.

“Footloose Investors: Investing in the Garment Industry in Africa” (August 2007) published by SOMO, Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations

International Labor Rights Forum

H.R. 3905: New Partnership for Development Act of 2007

For more information, contact: George Ngolwe

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