Produced in some 160 countries, apparel is one of the most global industries, and therefore a useful medium for considering alternative paths to the corporate globalization that appears to be, in part, what the war in Iraq was about.

A few giant retailers and super-labels that design clothes and contract production to factories around the world dominate the industry. These buyers demand ever-lower prices and faster deliveries from contractors the world over that bid against each other for scarce work. Looking to squeeze as much production as possible out of workers, employers pass on the demands of the buyers to the weakest link in the supply chain, the workers. Hence, the sweatshop abuses: excessively high production quotas; extremely long hours of work with forced overtime; restrictions on talking; supervised bathroom visits; forced pregnancy testing and firing of pregnant workers; and wages insufficient to meet workers’ most basic needs. There is a militarized environment surrounding the factories: tall walls topped with razor-sharp barbed wire and guards armed with shotguns instill discipline in workers who might attempt fighting for better conditions.

During the Iraq war demand soared for a T-shirt featuring the “Mother of All Bombs” after a national radio-show promoted it as patriotic. PICA seized the opportunity to create a different T-shirt to proclaim the possibility for peace based on globalization with justice.

The PICA Peace T-shirt features the reverse image of the “mother of all bombs”: for an exploding bomb is a life-giving tree; for a fighter-plane, a dove carrying a message of hope. The T-shirt is cut and sewn at the Maquiladora Cooperativa de Nueva Vida, a women’s sewing cooperative in Nicaragua. As a worker-owned facility producing clothing for export, the coop is an alternative model to the traditional maquilas, export factories that have sprung up in response to free-trade agreements and become synonymous with sweatshops. Their dream is to raise production levels to be able to provide steady full-time employment to more families in their community (where the unemployment level is 80 percent), and to support social projects such as homes for the elderly, children’s feeding centers, rehabilitation houses for drug addicts and schools. Over the last decade, the Americas have been the scene of many struggles against corporate globalization. Between 1985 and 2000 there were 396 sales and transfers of public assets to private corporations in Latin America as conditions of World Bank and International Monetary Foundation (IMF) loans.

The private sector was to generate jobs, deliver better services and be more responsive to “customer” needs. But analysts report that in Bolivia hundreds of thousands of workers have been thrown into sweatshop jobs, street peddling and coca farming as the national railways, airlines, telephone system, tin mines and municipal utilities privatized. In Mexico, wages have lost over 80 percent of their buying power during two decades of economic reform, while half a million small farmers have been driven off their land. Americans, too, are hard hit by corporate globalization. As a nation, those who have jobs are working far more than three decades ago and making relatively less for their efforts. In Maine, NAFTA and the World Trade Organization are responsible for a net loss of more than 22,000 jobs according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Given the human cost, there is no wonder that corporations are beginning to lose the battle for markets in our hemisphere. In Mexico, Maya Indians, displaced from land and resources, launched one of the most potent and inspiring contemporary social movements on the day NAFTA took effect. In El Salvador striking health care workers and doctors have successfully halted the privatization of the public healthcare system, and came two votes short of the first ever law against privatization of the public hospitals. In Bolivia, a coalition of factory workers, farmers, and environmental groups forced their government to annul a water services privatization contract to California engineering giant Bechtel after the company raised water rates by 200 percent, forcing minimum wage earners to pay a quarter of their pay to keep water running. The new publicly controlled company promptly lower rates and improved services. Now Evo Morales, an Indian labor leader, has introduced legislation to reverse other privatizations.

Booted out of Bolivia, Bechtel was one of the main lobbyists for the Iraq war, in the figure of its senior counselor and former president, George Schultz. Bechtel is now the recipient of several lucrative contracts in Iraq, including those for the water and sewage system. With everything from rebuilding roads and bridges to printing textbooks for sale, Iraq has become the newest frontier for corporate globalization. The World Bank and the IMF are reportedly ready to “play their normal role” in Iraq, providing part of the $20 billion per year Iraq is expected to need in the foreseeable future in exchange for privatization commitments that may make corporate contracts permanent.

President Bush’s 10-year plan for a U.S.-Mideast free-trade agreement also bodes well for corporations, eager to open new markets. But it may yield slim benefits for local populations if the U.S.-Jordan 2000 free-trade arrangement is any indication. Jordan has gone from zero to 60 factories with 40,000 workers

producing clothing for the U.S. market in three years. But Jordanians own almost none of those factories. The workers, like the cloth, are imported. They toil 65 hours a week at minimum wage and are housed in factory barracks, eight to a room, five and a half square feet for each worker per U.S. retailers’ specifications. When workers try to start a union, as 120 Bangladeshis did last summer, they are deported.

Worldwide people are taking different approaches to confront corporate globalization. For us, choosing the PICA Peace T-shirt over the MOAB version is a simple step that says no to the militarized globalization now under way in Iraq. Simple, but also meaningful in another respect, in that it is an investment in the work of people worldwide who, by traveling different paths, are converging in a pursuit of justice and creating new roadmaps for globalization.

Bjorn Skorpen Claeson is organizer for Peace through Interamerican Community Action (PICA), a Bangor-based nonprofit organization concerned with social and economic justice. For more information, go to www.pica.ws.