Keep it up and I'll buy more stuff at The Gap
Workers' Rights at Risk
Factory employees who may be displaced by a production shift find what once was an unlikely ally in retailer Gap. A push to improve conditions is growing.
By Evelyn Iritani and Marla Dickerson
Times Staff Writers
January 17, 2005
After a local clothing factory owner refused to hand over dues collected by a union, labor leader Bahlakoana Shaw Lebakae turned to an unlikely ally: Gap Inc.
Shortly after being contacted by the U.S. retailer, the owner — which has since gone out of business — paid up.
Once routinely reviled as a perpetrator of sweatshop misery in the developing world, San Francisco-based Gap is now viewed as a leader in the small but growing corporate movement to improve conditions for some of the world's most exploited workers.
"Gap is different," said Lebakae, who spends many nights visiting shantytowns on the outskirts of this capital city, home to many of Lesotho's 55,000 garment workers.
By leveraging its power as a major buyer of T-shirts, khaki pants and other apparel, Gap has brought together feuding labor leaders and factory owners in Lesotho and other African countries, helped train independent factory monitors in Central America and supported a program in Cambodia that provides expanded access to the U.S. apparel and textile market in exchange for improved factory conditions.
Gap Chief Executive Paul Pressler told a recent industry gathering that he intended to use the demise of apparel and textile import quotas to improve the image of an industry regarded by many as exploitative and greedy.
The quota system that limited manufacturers' access to the U.S. apparel market ended this month, opening up the global garment trade.
Freed of the decades-old restrictions that dictated how much Gap could import from various countries, Pressler said he would direct his buyers to purchase from suppliers committed to treating their employees humanely.
Gap executives are challenging their competitors to join them in this effort, lest it be doomed to failure.
"No one company created these issues, and no one company can fix it by itself," said Alan Marks, Gap's chief spokesman.
