Speakers to explain conditions
of sweatshop workers
By Kurt Esposito
Assistant
Campus Editor
The Purdue Students Against Sweatshops will host
two speakers tonight who lived with sweatshop workers in Indonesia for
a month.
Jim Keady and Leslie Kretzu will present "Real
Life Survivor Story: Starving on a Nike Sweatshop Wage" at 7 tonight
in Matthews Hall, Room 210.
"I know for myself and Leslie it was the most difficult
month of our lives," said Keady, former St. John, Ind., soccer coach
and project director of the Olympic Living Wage Project. "It was about
as uncomfortable a place as one could find."
Keady and Kretzu, a student at Union Theology Seminary
in New York, spent August of last year adopting the lifestyle and diet
of factory workers in a Nike factory in Tangerang, Indonesia.
They lived on $1.25 a day, which is one of highest
salaries that workers in the factory receive, said Kretzu.
They did it as part of the Olympic Living Wage
Project, which is designed to see whether or not the Nike factory workers
living in Southeast Asia are paid high enough wages to maintain an adequate
lifestyle.
The village Keady and Kretzu stayed in was lined
with open sewers and they constantly dealt with the smell of burning
garbage. They also had to take baths in a mindi, an upright tub that
contained week-old water.
Keady said they stayed in a 9-by-9 foot box and
had to sleep on a cement floor with only thin mats between them and
the floor.
"On an average day you'd wake up feeling incredibly
hungry and sore from sleeping on cement," Keady said.
Keady said he lost 25 pounds during the month and
Kretzu lost 15 pounds. They said the only food they could afford to
eat each day was low-grade rice and vegetables.
Kretzu said that in their presentation they will
discuss the living and working conditions of the sweatshop workers,
as well as what can be done to alleviate the problem.
Keady and Kretzu said they found evidence of workers
not being able to live on $1.25 a day, workers being intimidated from
organizing unions and female workers being forced to prove they were
menstruating.
Indonesia has a law that states each female may
receive two unpaid vacation days from work each month during her menstrual
cycle. Kretzu said that because most women cannot afford to purchase
feminine hygiene products, they are forced to take these days off.
She said in order for them to take the days off,
they have to prove to the factory doctor that they are menstruating
by pulling down their pants in front of him.
She said because they receive unpaid vacation days,
many women would have to work overtime hours to make up for the lost
money and some women go to work and bleed through their pants all day.
Kretzu said these issues are not isolated to the
Nike factory. She said they also found workers' right violations at
other factories that produce apparel for Adidas, Tommy Hilfiger, Polo,
Old Navy, Gap, Fila and Ralph Lauren.
"We are not an anti-Nike campaign. We are an anti-exploitation
and pro-justice campaign," she said.
Keady and Kretzu are speaking as part of a national
speaking tour. Keady has made this presentation before at a public debate
at the New South Wales Parliament House during the 2000 Summer Olympics
in Sydney, Australia.
Negin Almassi, director of Purdue Students Against
Sweatshops, said the presentation will bring a new perspective on the
sweatshop issue to the Purdue campus because Keady and Kretzu are Americans
with experience dealing with people who have been affected by sweatshops.
"I think it's crucial for the Purdue community
to remember the reality of human rights abuses," said Almassi, "and
to put a word like 'sweatshop' in the context of real people."
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