Speakers discuss sweatshops

By Kurt Esposito
Assistant Campus Editor

Two human rights workers who spoke at Purdue Tuesday said the workers they lived with in Indonesia last year were being exploited by Nike and other corporations.

"These are not great jobs for human beings. And you cannot live on $1.25 a day. You may survive but you can’t live," said Jim Keady, former St. John's University soccer coach.

Keady and Leslie Kretzu, a human rights advocate, gave a presentation entitled "Real life survivor story: Starving on a Nike sweatshop wage."

They spoke of their experience living in an Indonesian village for a month with the factory workers from an alleged sweatshop.

"We starved on their pitiful wages to the near point of exhaustion," said Keady. "Their lives are the stories that are not always told."

They said some of the difficulties that workers at the factories had to endure were not having enough money to buy food each day and living in a village with open sewers and burning garbage.

Some students were asked to come up on stage and the speakers asked them how they would react if they faced similar situations in the United States.

Some of the hypothetical situations that were described were a woman being told she could not bear children because of fumes from her workplace and a woman being forced to pull down her pants in front of a doctor to prove she was menstruating. All the students agreed that the situations were deplorable.

A picture of a young girl, Sussanti, cowering in a small room was shown while Kretzu explained how the girl was suffering from a cough for four months because her father could not afford the health care.

Mo West, a junior in the School of Liberal Arts, said the pictures were effective because they showed the human side of the issue.

About 200 people showed up the speech and some even gave a standing ovation at the conclusion.

Joanna Rydberg, a senior in the School of Liberal Arts, said she found the speech informative and alarming. She said she did not understand why the Purdue Students Against Sweatshops held a hunger strike last year, but now she thinks she is capable of doing something similar.

"They changed my mind — made me realize we really can do something," she said.

The speakers offered solutions such as writing letters to local congress members and join human rights organizations.

Keady also localized the presentation when he said Gene Keady, Purdue's men basketball coach, was "prostituting" his players by having them wear merchandise from companies who use sweatshops to make their apparel.

They also spoofed one of Nike's most famous commercials. The Beatles song "Revolution " played as they showed pictures of starving workers and flashed messages such as "They are paying the price."

According to the speakers, they are paying the price so that others can receive bigger paychecks.

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Campus editor: Laura Pelner

Assistant campus editors: Kurt Esposito, Dave Stephens

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