Daniel Schweimler - Argentina's illegal sweatshops
In Argentina they call sweatshops talleres
clandestinos or clandestine workshops. But everyone, it seems, knows
where they are. They certainly now know the whereabouts of the one on the
corner of Páez and Terrada streets in the Flores neighbourhood of Buenos Aires.
For there was a fire there last month that killed two young boys, Rolando and
Rodrigo.
The neighbours have painted a mural, at the base of which
sit burnt candles and withered flowers. A pile of sodden clothes blocks the
pavement and police guard the charred doorframes. Omar Ruiz lives a few doors
away. "Behind all those houses you see there are sweatshops," he
said. "Secret launderies and boilers they use for industrial
ironing." Ruiz said there were six more sweatshops just on his block which
the city authorities had been advised of. The city government said it didn't
know that Páez 2796 was a sweatshop.
Ruiz said fires were common, and although the cause of this
latest one was still being investigated, it was possibly ignited by a spark
from industrial sewing machines being plugged into overloaded domestic sockets.
Since the fire, the Alameda Foundation, which campaigns for better working
conditions, has identified hundreds more sweatshops in and around Buenos Aires
which, along with Sao Paulo, has one of the greatest concentrations of the
illegal textile industry in South America.
Bolivian workers: Like
Rolando and Rodrigo, most of the workers come from Bolivia, enticed to
Argentina with the promise of housing and well-paid jobs. Olga Cruz came in
2000 with her two young children. Like many she was recruited by an agency in
Bolivia that took her passport. She said: "I was working with nine other
people in a tiny space where there was no room for us to move. "We were
hardly allowed to go to the toilet. We ate breakfast at our machines and we ate
lunch at our machines."
Cruz escaped and now works for the Alameda Foundation's
sewing cooperative - a maximum of eight hours a day and with a share of the
profits. "It's like in this country the laws don't exist," she said.
"No-one takes any notice of us foreigners, no-one cares about our work
conditions."
Gustavo Vera is a Buenos Aires city deputy who also
campaigns with Alameda. “We're talking about 68 percent of the Argentine
clothing industry being conducted in sweatshops," he said. "Informal
work, forced labour, people who work more than 12 hours a day without any
rights and even slave labour with workers living and working in the same place
without being able to leave." Vera wants the law changed to prevent
government departments buying from the sweatshops.
He also said the big name brands should declare that they
don't use what he called slave labour. More than 100 well known national and
international brands, (including the Spanish firm Zara and the sports giants
Puma and Adidas) have been named in legal proceedings as alleged sweatshop
customers. They all either deny the charge or say they're attempting to
disassociate themselves from them.
Highest price: The clothing is sold on the pavements
around Buenos Aires and at La Salada - a huge site on the outskirts of Buenos
Aires that has been described as the biggest counterfeit clothing market in
South America.
A few days after the fire at Páez 2796, Bolivian workers and
Argentine trade unions, accompanied by local residents, marched to the site of
another sweatshop fire that in 2006 killed six Bolivian workers, five of them
children. The owners were never prosecuted. Two managers are appealing against
their three-year jail sentences. The marchers unrolled strips of cloth
tied into a long string which they looped around trees and lampposts along the
2km route between the two houses. They marched in 2006 too. There was outrage
and indignation and promises by the authorities that they would tackle the
sweatshop industry. The number of sweatshops has only grown.
While immigrants work 16 or more hours a day, in cramped and
insanitary conditions, for a few cents or nothing at all, the profit margins
for the owners are mouth-watering. And what shopper doesn't want brand name
clothing at knockdown prices? But Rolando and Rodrigo, aged 10 and seven, paid
the highest price of all.
