ProgressOhio

Even blood on our tax dollars can get lost in numbers.

Numbers are the feed trough of government. Numbers elect. Numbers budget. Numbers pass legislation and the financial power of numbers gives government the opportunity to do good as well as oft-publicized evil.

They are impersonal, non-descriptive, bureaucratic realities. That’s why DAS Contract #RS903107 means little to Ohioans, to legislators and even to DAS department leaders. But it’s a number written in blood literally when Ohio purchases goods from sweatshops.

In May 2006, in a world away in Chattagong, Bangladesh, 600 mostly teenage women worked to fulfill the contract by making undergarments for Ohio prison inmates. A fiery blast disrupted their routine and their lives.

A first floor boiler exploded in an inferno that fed on the flammable material in the textile mill. Hundreds of young women must have panicked, only to find exits locked by factory guards protecting against theft and monitoring the 600 workers. An eyewitness survivor later reported:

“When the fire erupted, I was working on the second floor. One of the two collapsible gates on the floor was padlocked. Finding it impossible to come out through the milling crowd at the other gate, I jumped out through a window on the roof of a nearby two-storey building,” she said. “Some local people standing on the rooftop of that building broke open the window and helped us out”.

The morning after the blaze, Ohioans woke up to other news: Funds for the state’s unemployed workers would go broke in 2007; a rattled and lame duck Governor Bob Taft wanted tougher high school standards; then-Congressman Bob Ney’s former aide, Neil Volz, plead guilty and agreed to testify against Ney in Washington; a Toledo councilman plead guilty to ethics violations; and Ken Blackwell, who had won the GOP gubernatorial primary the week before, watched his own party deep-six his Tax Expenditure Limitation proposal.

Ohio newspapers, Ohioans and Ohio government officials were unaware of reports that at least 54 workers --an estimate that later climbed to more than 200 -- had died as they scrambled to fulfill a contract paid from state tax dollars. The contract remains in effect today.

State Contract Fuels Substandard Overseas Labor

Ohio DAS contract #RS903107 is with a company called Bob Barker/Leslee Scott (no relation to the retired Price Is Right host) which is one of the largest suppliers of correctional and rehabilitation undergarments in the United States. U.S. Port import records from February 2006 show that KTS Textile, the company that caught fire, shipped underwear for O’Right which supplies Bob Barker which in turn supplies Ohio.

Those women, trapped in an inferno behind locked gates, were manufacturing garments not only for Ohio prisons but also for garments and uniforms in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq.

Our tax dollars supported a foreign sweatshop known for forced overtime, seven-day work weeks, below-poverty wages, denial of maternity rights, physical abuse and suppression of workers’ rights.

The fact is, according to SweatFree Communities, in Ohio only Bedford Heights, Berea, Brookpark, Elyria, Fairview Park, Lakewood, North Olmstead, Parma, the City of Toledo , and Cuyahoga County have SweatFree provisions over public contracts.  The organization, SweatFree Communities, will be kicking off a long-term campaign this summer to get the State of Ohio and other local communities to join the effort to prohibit public tax dollars from funding sweatshops like the one in Bangladesh.

And don’t think this is an isolated problem.

Ohio Rooted Company with Defense Contracts Leads to Strike in China

Just this year, 4,000 workers in Guangzhou China went on strike – that’s right China – communist China -- over conditions created by an Ohio company outsourcing its work and holding military contracts for over $13 million in the first nine months of sales in 2005.

It’s a safe bet among Mao’s disciples that strikes in China don’t happen every day.

Why and how in the world can that happen – labor rebellion in post-Tiananmen, China? Why a supplier making none other than Nelsonville, Ohio’s, Rocky Shoes and Boots in Guangzhou went on strike to recover unpaid overtime wages going as far back as 2002.

Employees often work 15 hours a day, seven days a week, for as little as $5 a day. Workers also said that they are trained to deceive monitors that Quan Tak corporate clients send to inspect workplace conditions and that in retaliation workers who led efforts to improve conditions were fired.

“I’m a southeast Ohio boy,” Rocky CEO Mike Brooks told the Cincinnati Enquirer earlier this decade. Despite that, both the Enquirer and stock filings indicate that Rocky has two factories in the Dominican Republic, one in Puerto Rico, an office and buyers in China, buyers in Vietnam and a division chartered in the Caymen Islands.

Most of those jobs had been located in Nelsonville until NAFTA and outsourcing. But Brooks told the Enquirer, he has a soft spot for Nelsonville, “this company and the 150 jobs related to sales, design and distribution of Rocky shoes.” Office work still remains in Nelsonville.

His soft spot apparently does not extend to the state or local tax authorities as in an SEC tax filing from October 7, 1997 Rocky revealed:

“The Company receives favorable tax treatment on income earned by its subsidiary in Puerto Rico and benefits from local tax abatements available to such subsidiary. During the fourth quarter of Fiscal 1996, the Company elected to repatriate future earnings of its subsidiary in the Dominican Republic. The repatriation of earnings from its subsidiary in the Dominican Republic is subject to federal income tax, but is exempt from state and local taxation.”

Back in China, according to workers in the factory, the company making Rocky products has embezzled 2-4 hours of workers’ wages and overtime compensation every day since 2002. Workers typically have to work on Sundays without any salary or overtime compensation.

It’s bad labor policy that is so egregious that even in totalitarian Communist China this worker treatment is strike-worthy.

Rocky Boots does business with many local, county and state entities as well as their military contracts with the federal government.

Will Ohio Go Sweat Free

As the SweatFree Communities organization launches later this summer in Ohio, the Strickland Administration has an opportunity to take steps made by California, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Vermont in making an effort to avoid contracting with overseas sweatshops.

Ohio has at least two other contracts with companies on the SweatFree list of companies to be watched. The first, VF Corporation, provides uniform outerwear and in legally certified documents given to the City of Milwaukee admitted that in 2005 the company paid workers a base wage of $1.50 an hour – a figure disputed workers who said they made just $5.00 a day for their work.

The second company, Dayton-based Lion Apparel, provides special purpose clothing for the military, police and fire fighters. A 1999 report found that Lion had been cited by OSHA 32 times in 12 years for failing to give employees proper face protection and not training them in the proper handling of hazardous chemicals or the proper use of portable fire extinguishers in factories loaded with flammable materials. OSHA records revealed at the time that Lion refused to send workers to a doctor even when “a substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result.”

The question for Ohio taxpayers, as well as the Strickland Administration, is whether they view the economic force of state tax dollars as an economic incentive to change not just the working conditions for foreign workers – but the increasing race to the bottom of international wages that NAFTA was supposed to have safeguards against.

Cost savings in government are important, but there is also a cumulative effect of sweatshop wage workers which Ohioans feel more than most Americans as Ohio manufacturing is lost to sweatshop foreign wages (a fact that Sherrod Brown rode into our nation’s most exclusive club in Washington D.C.)

Groups like SweatFree do diligent research to identify worker practices that most Americans will not tolerate – so it is not as if these companies cannot be identified by government purchasers.

The question again comes back to numbers. The numbers of Ohioans opposed to outsourcing can make or break a candidate’s campaign as Mike DeWine and former Rep. Tom Sawyer (now a State Senator) discovered on past Election Days. But once in office, the rhetoric of outsourcing faces increasing pressure from those budget numbers which at the state and local level are increasingly tight.

But then again, at what point is the price of saving money worth the blood?

Here’s hoping this picture from a faraway Bangladeshi factory, taken that fateful night two years ago sears into the minds of us all.

I bet if you take the time to look hard enough you can still hear the screams, not so long ago, of the 600 workers penned in by unsafe conditions. The question from us all is whether a boiler fueled that fire alone – or did our Ohio tax dollars?

Here’s hoping our government sees the true numbers.