Holiday campaign targets sweatshops

BANGOR – Two days before Thanksgiving, the Bangor Clean Clothes Campaign is launching a Holiday Season of Conscience campaign to raise awareness of child labor and sweatshop working conditions, and to let people know about simple steps they may take to make a difference during the holiday shopping season.

The Holiday Season of Conscience Poster Contest exhibit will be held at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 25, at the Clark House Art Gallery, 128 Hammond St. It is free and open to the public.

Officials at the Clean Clothes Campaign said that workers in sweatshop conditions make most clothing. According to the International Labor Organization, nearly 250 million children worldwide, including 73 million younger than age 10, are involved in some form of child labor that produces consumer products – instead of going to school and enjoying childhood.

Sweatshops hurt Maine workers and communities when companies move to exploit low wages and loose regulations, BCCC officials added. In recent years, more than 1,000 shoe and mill workers in the area have lost their jobs.

“We have to think outside the box in order to change the world,” said Kirsten Reberg-Horton, a co-winner in the Holiday Season of Conscience Poster Contest.

“The media, our schools, our employers sell us a world that seems static and unchangeable,” she said. “They sell us a world where we are supposed to accept that our clothes are made in sweatshops, that our children’s toys are made by other children. Instead of accepting the world that they sell us, we have to imagine the world that we want … so, in the poster, we are standing together around the world with real love and caring and imagination.”

The Bangor Clean Clothes Campaign will distribute a free Holiday Season of Conscience pamphlet that outlines resources to help people take action to end sweatshops and child labor, including a list of stores participating in the Bangor Clean Clothes Campaign. A Clean Clothes Web site is also offered in the pamphlet, which helps find products “made with dignity” – not made in sweatshops.

The Bangor Clean Clothes Campaign is a community-based initiative that hopes to create a market demand for workers’ rights and human dignity in the global apparel industry, according to the pamphlet.

The campaign helped Bangor become the first North American city to support the idea of a clean-clothes commercial zone and was instrumental in getting the Legislature to pass an anti-sweatshop purchasing law, members said.

To receive a Holiday Season of Conscience pamphlet, or to obtain information, call the Bangor Clean Clothes Campaign at 947-4203.