It seems that Kohl's sells millions of dollars worth of jeans from a big Taiwanese-owned factory in Nicaragua that has been embroiled in a labor dispute for nearly two years. The factory, called Chentex, employs nearly 2,000 people, mostly young women and teenagers, in a free trade zone outside the capital city of Managua. The firm pays its workers a total of 20 cents, at piecework rates, for each pair of jeans they sew, according to worker pay stubs and company documents Kernaghan has collected. The average hourly pay comes out to about 53 cents. Even if you add in productivity bonuses, fringe benefits and other indirect costs, the total labor cost to Chentex of producing one pair of jeans comes to 38 cents, Kernaghan calculates.
Workers say they are subjected to physical searches and sometimes beaten by their supervisors.
Immediately after the strike, the company fired 11 union leaders. That led to another three-day strike and mass firings. Kernaghan and the union say as many as 500 former workers have been dismissed since then and the company has filed criminal charges against several leaders. The labor dispute at Chentex has sparked a lot of attention in Washington. Last summer, more than 60 members of Congress wrote to President Clinton to demand he investigate the matter.