Pa., N.J. join Maine’s sweatshop initiative

The governors of Pennsylvania and New Jersey have joined Gov. John E. Baldacci’s initiative to prevent state government purchases from businesses that manufacture in sweatshop conditions.

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine and Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell have announced that their states will join Baldacci’s proposed Governors’ Coalition for Sweatfree Procurement and Worker Rights.

“There’s power in numbers,” said Baldacci in a written statement issued Monday. “We’ve been doing great work on anti-sweatshop procurement in Maine, but as we team up with other states we’ll have even more influence in the global marketplace.”

In 2001, Maine adopted the nation’s first sweat-free procurement law to require apparel, textile and footwear contractors to disclose their supply chain so that the state could verify that its purchases had not been manufactured in sweatshops. The law requires the contractors to adhere to international standards of workplace fairness and safety.

The state defines a sweatshop as any factory that violates the labor laws of the country in which it is situated, according to Alan Stearns, spokesman for Baldacci. Sweatshops are notorious for subjecting employees to long hours under bad conditions in return for low wages.

In 2003, after the state purchased a small quantity of T-shirts from Gildan’s Activewear, a state worker questioned whether Gildan’s clothing was sweatshop free.

“We spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out how and where the clothing had been manufactured, in Honduras, and we discovered the severe limitation that we have in doing any sort of investigation,” said Betty Lamoreau, director of the state Division of Purchases.

Lamoreau said it became obvious that Maine needed to team up with other states and together hire an independent monitor to investigate the supply chains of apparel and other product distributors.

In February, Baldacci sent a letter to other governors, asking them to join his coalition “to end unsuspecting taxpayer support for sweatshop abuses and to help create market demand for fair labor standards.”

So far there are three members in the coalition.

The state has spent more than $100,000 on apparel, textile and footwear this year so far, according to Lamoreau. One use of such purchases is uniforms and blankets for inmates in state prisons and uniforms for prison guards, Stearns said.

The concern is not that sweatshops exist in Maine, but that they exist in other parts of the country and around the world, according to Bjorn Claeson, director of Bangor’s Sweatfree Communities, a national organization that coordinates support for anti- sweatshop campaigns.

Sweatfree Communities, cofounded by Bangor’s Peace through Interamerican Community Action, supports the governor’s coalition. Claeson says apparel factories in New York City, New Jersey and Southern California employ sweatshop conditions.

“We can pool our resources to collectively lean on factories to improve their conditions,” Claeson said.