Great opportunity: a Salvadoran Free Trade Zone (FTZ) brochure boasts Rosa Martinez will sew clothes for 57 cents an hour. Better news: that brochure is out-dated. A more recent, federally-funded, brochure brags Rosa works for 33 cents hourly!

Goons with Guns “monitor” Third World Rosas in barbed-wire sweatshops. Your tax dollars created FTZ’s. Girls (as young as 13) work 10-hour days, sometimes more. Amid textile dust, sweltering workers, often malnourished, suffer chronic bronchitis. After a few debilitating years corporations toss Rosa aside, putting fresh teens through the mill. Conglomerates pay no tax on FTZ work; they import FTZ’s duty free. Tariff fees are reduced.

Octavio, a Honduran fifth-grader, is forced to work a 14-hour shift to meet garment production quotas. Workers requesting medical care are often fired. Harsh bleaching of “stone-washed” jeans damages skin.

Warnaco, which tried to close Maine’s Hathaway plant, has increasingly used Third World labor. They’re not alone. Many Maine shoe and textile plants have closed. For what?

Credit our government for humor. “Free Trade Zone” means children working for slave wages without water or bathroom breaks, abused, often hit — surrounded by Goons with Guns. Free trade? Who’s free? The People of Faith Network (PFN) wants to know.

Grace Braley, known in Bangor for her work with Peace through InterAmerican Community Action (PICA), is now national organizer for the PFN in New York. She organizes religious groups against “virtual slave labor.” Call: 718-625-7515. PFN works with the National Labor Committee (NLC), exposing worker exploitation.

For Augusta native Barbara Briggs, NLC associate director, plant closings were part of growing up. In college, researching U.S. Central American policies, Barbara discovered jobs leaving Maine weren’t lost to a free market; peasants, “denied human rights,” are forced into sweatshops, “racing American workers to the bottom.”

NLC Executive Director Charlie Kernaghan, recently inventoried Biddeford’s WalMart (signs read: Buy American Made). In Kernaghan’s inventory 93 percent of “Kathie Lee” garments were made offshore, with similar percentages for other Walmart brands. Management threw Charlie out when they saw him gathering information.

Conglomerates want secret markets, not free markets — secret labor camps, secret child labor. Kernaghan tracks the apparel industry from Biddeford to China. The New York Times described Charlie’s style as akin to “a radical priest.” A photographer, Kernaghan was in El Salvador in the early 1980s when U.S. “intelligence” armed murderers of peasants, priests, and nuns.

These religious folks care less about the stain on Monica’s GAP-made dress than about who made that dress. Clinton promised to enforce NAFTA’s human rights”side agreements.” Instead he created a garment industry task force, then took no action.

NLC took action. Two Manhattan rabbis sent letters to the GAP warning they would instruct their congregations that GAP clothing violated Jewish ethical law. GAP executives agreed to human rights monitoring. NLC increased sweatshop awareness, exposing the Kathie Lee Gifford scandal.

But corporations, CIA-style, refuse (“security reasons”) to reveal plant sites. “Security” — to exploit children. NLC documentaries show worker families in cardboard houses — kid brothers and sisters fly-covered, rheumy-eyed. Security? Free market?

When President Bill Clinton stood in Tiananmen Square, he ignored human ights. Workers in a Chinese handbag factory, according to The Washington Post, aren’t paid for three and four months on end. Unpaid workers, like slaves, were given enough food to keep them alive. Free market?

Labor camps mean profits. Asian economic collapse? Indonesian worker pay drops 75 percent? Hello Jakarta!

But those Manhattan rabbis proved clergy can provide moral leadership. NLC, PICA, and PFN don’t want to close Third World shops. They want free markets: human rights, liveable wages. These workers don’t expect U.S. wages, but making Disney T-shirts shouldn’t cause malnutrition.

Are you wearing sweatshop clothes? Get a list of “Clean Clothes” retailers from PICA (947-4203). Join NLC’s contest in which youth identify sweatshop clothing. Your congregation can urge corporations to reveal sweatshop sites to human rights workers. Call 212-242-3002.

At Saturday’s Clean Clothes Fun Fair fourteen participating retailers will feature clothes “made with dignity” from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., Norumbega Park (between Central and Franklin). Eat free food, enjoy Dave Mallett’s music.

The fair will feature documentaries “Zoned for Slavery” and “Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti.” You’ll never forget vermin and fly-infested shacks, open sewers, children in rags. Meanwhile film producers, with biting irony, play “Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, it’s off to work we go.”

When Disney released the live action “101 Dalmatian” their press releases touted their kindness to Dalmatian “actors.” Meanwhile, Haitian bosses pay women six cents for each “Dalmatians” T-shirt ($19.99 retail).

Clean Clothers campaigns are widespread in Europe. Bangor leads the Clean Clothes fight in our hemisphere. Our city officially urges retailers to sell ethically produced garments.

PICA’s Clean Clothes Consumer Network organizes citizens who want clothes that don’t exploit Free Slave Zones. Join: 947-4203.

Sean Faircloth lives in Bangor.