Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Celebrities in the Apparel Industry

Celebrities should take more responsibility for clothing that has their name on it, especially when it comes to the apparel industry. In this video is about Kathy Lee upset that people were accusing her of not caring work sweatshop workers. I don’t see where she doesn’t think it’s her responsibility. Her name is on it and if you’re going to license your name you should research or know what your name is being placed on. Some of the productions of her clothing are made in Honduras. In this video we get to see the treatment of sweatshop workers in El Salvador. The workers in the sweatshops are young teenage women who are taken out of school to work for seventy-eight cents an hour. No one in the production process making American clothing is American. The workers are Salvadorian; the managers are Korean, in a Taiwanese factory, for shirts made out of Hong Kong cotton. Workers in these El Salvadorian are treated just as those in Bangladesh workers; they are beaten by their managers, forced to worker over time, and are mostly women. They work from dawn until night. The intent of globalizing is to build economies and in El Salvador the opening of sweatshops were intended to rebuild the economy after a civil war. From this Dateline video we get to hear stories from sweatshop workers. We get to hear about how a sweatshop here in the U.S. had to close down because they couldn’t compete with overseas sweatshop. The loss of apparel jobs in America left 93,000 Americans out of jobs. Apparel manufacturers are always looking for cheap labor and becoming more competitive for lesser paying opportunities. Salvadorians are being priced out by Honduras workers for thirty-eight cents an hour and Honduras workers are being priced out by Haitian workers for thirty cents an hour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCszZ5lwAgA&feature=related

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