Promoting decent work in Asia and Latin America
From two corners of the world, Thailand and Argentina, two groups of workers have joined to make their own common call to arms: no more chains in the garment industry! Dignity Returns in Bangkok and La Alameda in Buenos Aires jointly call upon consumers and activists alike to support decent work in the garment industry – by supporting their global sweat-free brand, No Chains.
The new brand was launched on 4 June, 2010 and it was born as a fight against continuation of sweatshops and to offer a viable alternative model of decent work. The promoters of the idea put it simply: “Unlike for other famous clothing brands, those who buy No Chains products give 100% of the reward of the labor to the workers – there is no trade fairer than this”.
The workers who formed Thailand’s Dignity Returns cooperative were all unfairly dismissed employees of Bed and Bath, a sweatshop facility that forced members of its production teams to consume amphetamines so that they could work consecutive shifts, while fining workers’ several days wages for sneaking bites of food during long periods when breaks were not permitted.
In Argentina, many Bolivian workers have been rescued by members of the La Alameda cooperative, which has denounced the sweatshop owners for their illegal detention of entire families of migrants that work under slave conditions in clandestine home factories.
Experience clearly shows that no improvement in workers’ conditions can be meaningful and lasting without worker representation, either through genuine trade unions or through worker-ownership. The workers of No Chains know this from their own lives.
The concept of No Chains was born when two cooperatives met at a 2009 Bangkok labor conference about workers’ responses to economic crisis. Gustavo Vera from La Alameda had been invited to share the experiences of Argentinean workers in 2001 who occupied factories when their management left them bankrupt and unpaid.
La Alameda in Argentina and Dignity Returns in Thailand thus agreed to jointly launch a global brand of sweat-free clothes, calling upon both consumers and social movement groups to help end slave labor in the garment industry. Both cooperatives were already well-known for being composed of seasoned workers who had faced forced labor conditions and now fought for the core values of worker self-management, solidarity, and decent work.
Now, the workers form a unique venture between Asia and Latin America. Though they are continents apart, they share common problems of democracy, social inequality, and poverty and exploitation of workers, especially of migrants.
In Buenos Aires and Bangkok, the models of T-shirts were displayed in a simultaneous launch event linked by videoconference technology, on June 4, 2010. The T-shirt designs that were presented were made by designers from South Korea, Indonesia, U.S., Hong Kong and Argentina, and were chosen by the workers in an open global design contest earlier this year.
