be here at the group pleasure to welcome you and i i wonder if you could we've got a quite a little time but maybe you could share a little of your own background if you could and weave that in with the establishment of the national labor committee and then firsthand and it really had a huge impact changed my life and so ever since that moment that was december one thousand a fire from that moment on i've been organizing around issues dealing with the global economy ok had you been involved in those in chicago and the new school for social research or new york would study from a psychology but i left before i finished my ph d i was interested in being in school i got close and i realized i don't want to go from graduate school in to teaching so i dropped out and took a freighter both africa wow and what i really love was photography and i started to do that and found out you can't live the process of that whole experience of trying to do the photography getting odd jobs to support myself i live on the lower east side of manhattan then came this came this invitation to go to central america and you can you saw the conditions out there there's a political conditions in the you know the political situation but there's also an ongoing situation that devolving since then and it's going on all over the world that has to be addressed radically aware of the downside is that eighty five percent of the men will be too aggressive they figure the women will be more docile and he's the abuse and to exploit so they hire young women eighty five percent of the work is these factors young women sixteen to twenty five years of age i say before they can get a job in these factories they have to undergo mandatory pregnancy tests and you know i can do that you've got these got you've got some things are going to roll in an informal way i'm going to come back to this yeah yeah this is a shirt yeah this mike you shirt this you know one hundred and forty dollar instantaneously immediately pregnant you're out because they don't want to maternity benefits you went to these factories you're going to work a twelve hour shift you're going to work really from six thirty in the morning till six hundred and thirty at night you sometimes work seven days a week on the weekends maybe i'll government slowing down the line they don't want anybody to use the bathroom so it's as if they're a prison that the raise their hand to get permission to use the bathroom they get a ticket from the supervisor they have to give the ticket to an armed guard at the toilet and then used a bathroom guard at the sink and you drink the tap water the workers tell us they were getting sick from the water so we had to test it we sent in a sterilized bottle with the rochas and we took it to a laboratory the writer had four hundred and twenty nine times the bacteria levels allowable an thing like to tell you like to go to the doctor three dollars and forty two cents eleven dollars for new shoes for the kids to go to school milk for the three kids would be about zero dollars eighty cents a day they don't have it women making one hundred and forty dollars nike  a jerseys yeah yeah they're raising their children on coffee and sugar water because they can't afford milk that this is the true face of the world economy you raise your trojan on sugar water and coffee because you can't afford milk you're many so and your interest it's interesting you mention that about detroit and the automakers you know in a car you're going to buy a car or a truck seventeen percent of the cost of that vehicle is in labor all right seventy percent so you've got a thirty thousand dollars truck five thousand one hundred dollars of that is in benefits and wages seventeen percent so you see this race to the bottom the really just in the united states to make an automobile would be seventy percent of the cost of that at it like this where is now brought just company in the world by sales is that right grandma to know ramos the largest private sector employer in the united states at wages of like sixty seven dollars now very poor and no tires point pig heaven it is yeah it's the biggest dog in many ways it really is the biggest dog when it's micrograms crime almost it's hard it's hard sometimes to see the difference because the biggest cheat and the biggest bug is going to win because they keep ostrow do we factor all those kind of things in in terms of looking at the world and what the possibilities are getting at one of the for the workers it's of the world it's a work it's more brutal now you know less use the example of china know we went through a factory posing as academics in china and we run into holds for we run into this young woman you see she was about sixteen years of about some of the toys and stuff like that but just to the point of us about labor rights in china you have no labor rights not know if you try to organize i'm independent union in china you're going to be arrested now there's almost like a double avenue some of them cross aerated in prisons and some of them a taken to psychiatric hospitals where they're force fed mind altering drugs and given electric shock treatment is this there's absolutely no right i mean cause there's no religious freedoms  labor freedoms so what you have the room reading standards all around the world and what the we in the united states i mean we're we're such a big country like with the largest market in the world you know for example we take in forty two percent of china's exports worldwide yeah ok i mean we ran in two thousand we ran it any three point eight billion dollars trade deficit with china three billion dollars yeah and people say we're protectionist that's nonsense we take in free two percent of china's export drums this this would be your typical dorm in china and you see the way they do it they told us that you could stuff they thought we were a us company where there aren't and they said to us look we're going to stick you know then you have to run back to the cemetery the good shepherd line up to take a shower and if you're not in front of the rhine by the time it's your turn you can hold rather with your breath to bed at three o'clock at night and you have to get up at seven so you're gone you're trying to get by during the busy these multinational companies to go out around the world cripple their arms around young women that's what it is it's sixteen to twenty five year old women bring them into the grammar economy they have no troops with defend themselves the stripped of their rights if they try to organize defied and beaten and these women are how these governments don't have any ability to bring some sort of some sort of bargaining power in view for their citizens of either companies or what's the relationship of all of that i mean are some worse than others are some are more able to allow for right exploitation is there some protests relaunch by governments or entities within these various countries or what's reality you're right on the ground and then i'm worse than others the is they have good labor laws out of the labor market to be on the books that out of what sense of right guys does that mean they'll follow like you know standards and they will i mean they i mean they will fire them but i mean they'll follow him on paper in other words  almost everywhere you are refined good labor laws whether it's china or honduras or i mean not much different from the united states sometimes better united states but the thing is is that never ever implemented and to the like you know to give them you could sometimes say that unemployment in the developing world if you if you really calculated between unemployment and underemployment you could be talking to sixty percent of the people truly it's you know them crossing the border it's frightening and so people are desperately need these jobs and so the government's in a bit of a trap because they need the investment they need these factories they move jobs for the people that's fine that's you know that would be right but with the companies trying to do then is they try to milk and explain the vulnerability of these workers ok you're out of work you need a job you're very pro country you're surrounded by sixty percent unemployment the companies use that as a rices to exploit people yet where they have all the rest saying to the companies the whole process is work where sent to the companies is poverty and misery around the web does not give you a license to exploit people you strick have to treat people like human being how they respect their basic right ok good so you're talking to human rights kind of thing and that kind of attitude in a social conscience kind of thing you're calling upon what they would been able to bring off the books the economics textbook that talk about comparative advantage and then say we will go where ever you can go and that this is the way capitalism works you will get the best possible deal you can get and if not your competitors will and they will run you out and so forth and you know that stacks up in terms of their of their economic there is that they will come forth and say they will have to bring themselves up as we did or something or is that what they are  label or trademark yeah you're going to prison and you going to pay a big fine ok this letter but it's protected by the red organization or i just labors protected by intellectual property rights and copyright law if you limit take this level you're paying a fine and companies will was protected they say yes that's how it should be so you say to them what about the sixteen year old girl who made this label and the companies say oh no we can't protect our rights because that would be an impediment on free  you if you look at nike again they spend over a one billion dollars you don't have a touching so every time you look at a nike product you can say eleven percent of that product isn't advertising nike spends more to advertise that's make a worse through time and you've been at it how long now since eighty five dollars and during that time when it was bad then when it varies against ours but in some cases it's getting a little better what i mean by worse is it's well over the world now car for example i would say the turning point was the reagan administration reagan in the bush administrations it was a time that really there was a flight to job flight from the united states companies fled decent wages led unions led health and safety environmental protections taxes and so we're talking you know there was a rumor brown bike from seventy eight to like eleven for eighty five federal kids and i says during sexual harassment in the factory they said no they didn't really know what i was talking about but i said well that's the manager ever touch you and things like this and i said yeah that if they let the manager find a lemon touch them tragedy but even a little worse when we st started because in honduras for example they would come into the factories with white outfits on and they would press we inject the women breast so we inject the women with what we believe to be contraceptives there'll be no the reason why they would it's getting worse things are getting worse because it's going all over and spreading out everywhere and you have three million toy workers in china many not making outwards three million there are up there are in china for a one million apparel workers so now you're talking about  in united states economy now is there's going to be some people here in the united states that are going to be either a embarrass by the realization of the product that they buy has been bought by them some sort of social conscience something that can be live here in the united states and is that what you're directing it at and what about the kids and college i think college kids able to get up in arms about this or are people of conscience that are concerned with that movie address that one perhaps bright thought in terms of how exactly race t decency to the american people sense of fairness and justice and amazing people like ourselves human rights work is our job is just to get the information to the american people now that i'm about to do it but right now when people like you said when people hear these stories when they see these photographs when they see these young workers we have to bring them to the united states and to us when they hear them and listen to their stories the american people are angry and they want change and we have the power to make change because we buy these products rather run for american people the american we want to keep to drive in the developing world but we want to put pressure on u s companies to look with the contractors to clean up these factories to empty the violations to respect the rights of these workers we have the power to do that so it's very much a moral campaign and  it would make a huge difference to them but it has such a small amount of what the overall cost is one dollar would think it could be factored in is that something to look for a credit doubling of the wages generally i would get rid of a lot of the problem what your view or what w and they grew for for once and then everybody will go there like the comparative advantage do they argue that those who are in favor of this there or wouldn't there be some repulsion because it must be even in the part of the people who are  forcing it would know that it's wrong at a certain level if you understand what i'm saying i don't i don't know how they look at their radical understanding of what makes this reasonable and it's st of all you know companies don't have moral there's nothing  immoral about a corporation has no moral we in the beginning we were naive we kept looking for the moral compass that these companies might have they don't have doesn't exist where bought has nothing they could care less about human rights and they only respond to pressure so you know we know about now and the that's a lot of baloney because what happens is if you listen program on ninety they're a religious organization traveling around the world to help develop poor countries if you listen to them then yeah yeah yeah yeah and we went to the dominican republic yeah and we dug around in the garbage dump and we happened to find all of nike's internal pricing documents so i want to explain how a religious company operates you see it's this for this program and this kind of goes to the dominican republic to be a women's rights respected and kids colored students on over two hundred campuses across the country and the big ones like university of michigan you took a big universe in north carolina big schools have  a way that a market notion or a notion of the market dictates where you can just got all the power you've got the capital comparative advantage you can the right because there are floatable and so far they've got all those things what standards would be put in there that would make it so that it would be a workable or even just in your view what could be done if there was an eruv public water standing and with some political clout and so forth or maybe abstractly for what would be no reason and no it does you know in  for the family to improve but survive in those crime out of misery at the poverty but i'm much more interested in that fact that if workers in these countries have the legal rights the got laws like i said their legs are bad but they're on a paper i think with the we're respected represent can take care of themselves they don't need charity from us really want is the legal rights of their own country they're not there because they want the u s companies and the multinational companies to respect their local world and that's being denied those rights and not this as a notion because they have this idea of the free market and competitiveness going on to be some countervailing thing to that and also how would that play into normal economic theory of how it might benefit in terms of creating markets there in their own and wages in other words if you if you can start with that that's the best of the quest and it's accepted i revel the world there's an internationally recognized worker rights if we can get our companies to adhere to those worker rights we will end sweatshops and child labor no people the internet to some things are beginning to happen only communicate with people you said you're hopeful of the picture your point is pretty dire and the cards are the trump is all in the hands of the corporations that are running this thing they've got everything going for him the capital base is still small ownership bill kristol variance trying to get some ownership in the general people's hands that's not very well going along or anything where do you get your sense of optimism and hope well i mean if we only got a few min so there's a group in new york city quest scale student committee against labor exploitation and there's a group up in rockland county high school students there's a group in vermont you know but it's high school students across the country are picking up th