These only cover a few of them .. but it gives you an idea .. AND perhaps .. will tweek OUR memories ..
Automobile Safety: The auto industry fought for decades to prevent mandatory seat-belts, air-bags and other critical safety features. Why? Because adding such life-saving devices cut into profits.
Auto Mechanics: It's almost a certainty: the final bill will exceed the original estimate. Even worse: mechanics who make unnecessary repairs.
The Battle of the Taxi-Cabs: You want the lowest fare possible, but your cabbie wants the highest. As a result, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.
The Cable Industry: After deregulation in 1984, cable prices soared, quality of programming plummeted, and service providers began selling their channels in indivisible blocs to prevent subscribers from voting with their dollars. From 1986 to 1990, the cost of basic service rose 56 percent -- twice the rate of inflation.
The Corporate Special Interest System: So who's bribing our Congress? In 1992, corporations formed 67 percent of all PACs, and they donated 79 percent of all contributions to political parties. This poses a dilemma to believers in the invisible hand: how do you condemn today's government without condemning the free market that controls it? A better alternative: democracy.
Corporate Welfare: Private enterprise is quite adept at feeding at the public trough, despite its professed antagonism for government. One of the most famous examples is the Wool and Mohair Lobby, which receives $100 million a year for a product the Pentagon no longer needs. Estimates of corporate welfare run from $85 billion to $800 billion a year.
The Cuyahoga River: This Ohio river was so polluted by industrial waste that it caught fire three times. Government stepped in and ordered a $1.5 billion cleanup. Today, the river is clean.
The Drug Industry: According to Dr. George Silver, a professor at the Yale University School of Medicine, about 22 percent of the 6 billion doses of antibiotic medicine each year are overprescribed, resulting in 2,000 to 10,000 unnecessary deaths annually.
The Exploding Ford Pinto: Ford knew for years that it would cost only $11 per Pinto to correct defective gas tanks that exploded upon impact. The company decided it was cheaper to let its customers burn and pay out damages to victims or their families instead. (More)
The Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill: The oil industry has long fought to defeat laws requiring double-hulled oil tankers. And what few oil-spill cleanup measures existed at Prince William Sound were ones that legislators had mandated. These measures failed miserably when the single-hulled Exxon Valdez ran aground and spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska's most scenic waters.
Global Warming: Despite the fact that the National Academy of Sciences is "90 percent sure" that global warming is occurring, the fossil fuel industry is resisting all change. It has even formed the "Global Climate Coalition," a public relations group that attempts to convince the public that global warming is a myth.
Insurance Companies: This industry is famous for battling its own customers in court to avoid paying awards. It has shut out patients with pre-existing conditions, allowing them to die to preserve profits. It has reduced hospital stays for mothers giving birth to 24 hours ("drive-by deliveries") to cut coverage costs.
Jack-in-the-Box: In 1993, E. coli poisoning from undercooked hamburgers killed three Seattle children and sickened hundreds of others. It is estimated that foodborne illness affects anywhere from 6.5 million up to 81 million people a year. About 9,000 die from E. coli and salmonella alone. Yet the food industry has heavily lobbied Congress to deregulate and relax federal food inspection standards.
Love Canal: Between 1942 and 1954, the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation dumped 22,000 tons of 248 assorted chemicals in and around Love Canal. Despite claims to the contrary, Hooker neither adequately disposed of the chemicals nor fully warned property buyers of the risks. After a sharp rise in cancer rates and birth deformities, President Carter declared Love Canal a federal disaster area and over 1,000 households were permanently evacuated from their homes. (More)
McDonald's: For years, London Greenpeace distributed a brochure criticizing McDonald's role in rainforest destruction, labor exploitation, animal abuses, unhealthy food and child manipulation. McDonald's first infiltrated the group with spies, then attempted to censor the protesters by suing them in court for libel. The case became the longest in British libel history when the defendents put up a surprisingly strong defense. The case received international attention and became a major public relations disaster for McDonald's when their own witnesses actually confirmed the brochure's criticisms. (See McSpotlight)
The Media (Part 1): The primary goal of the media is to make money, not educate. Thus, news programs attempt to attract viewers by titillating them with controversy, scandal, sensationalism, sex, violence and demagoguery. The trend towards "punch" journalism has reduced the average sound bite from 42 seconds in 1968 to 8 seconds in 1992.
The Media (Part 2): The media is being increasingly monopolized by corporate owners, and they depend on corporations for their advertising dollars. Not surprisingly, the media is virtually uncritical of corporate America. In 1989, the three major networks devoted only 2.3 percent of the news to worker's issues -- like workplace safety, child care and income disparity -- despite the fact that workers constitute the largest share of their audience.
The Minimum Wage: Business owners say market forces should determine entry-level wages, not the government. But the job market does not operate by the usual laws of supply and demand. The economy is kept at a 6 percent unemployment rate (the "natural rate of unemployment") for reasons beneficial to business. Because there are more workers than jobs, it's an employer's market, and employers can therefore force entry-level wages below the poverty level. (More)
Monopolies: In unregulated economies, relentless competition first leads to a wave of business failures, followed by the rise of monopolies. Economists condemn monopolies for their price-gouging, low-quality products, inefficiency and abuses of power.
New Coke: Everyone remembers Coca-Cola's disastrous experiment with New Coke, and it's hasty return to "Coke Classic." What most people don't know is that the outraged public got another poke in the eye by a recalcitrant Coke management, in that they actually gave so-called "Coke Classic" a higher fructose content. Truly, the customer is king…
Ozone Depletion: It took growing scientific warnings from 1975 to 1986 before Dupont even conceded that CFCs were responsible for destroying the ozone layer. Since then, it has dragged its feet coming to a full ban on ozone-depleting chemicals.
Path Dependency: Economists have chronicled hundreds of examples where an accident of history put the economy on a path from which it is almost impossible to diverge, even though better paths show up. Example include the inferior QWERTY typewriter keyboard, the gasoline engine and the VHS video system. (More)
Planned Obsolescence: Lifetime light bulbs, run-free nylons, durable heels for tennis shoes and long-life answering machines were all invented a long time ago. Businesses do not market them because they would go out of business after the initial flurry of sales. Even small-time entrepreneurs willing to make money for a short time find it difficult to break into these markets, because the majors can force them out with lawsuits, market-manipulations, artificially low prices, lobbying, etc.
Pollution: This is probably the most famous example of free market failure. Usually, dumping pollution is cheaper than treating it. But businesses conduct slick advertising campaigns to convince the public that they are stalwart defenders of the environment. Environmentalists call these P.R. efforts "ecopornography."
The Prisoner's Dilemma: This is an irony that occurs frequently in life. Two individuals are faced with the opportunity to cooperate to acheive a good result. However, following their own self-interest with impeccable logic, they shun cooperation and come to a worse result. A strong refutation to the invisible hand. For details, see More.
Recessions and Depressions: Recessions have been a recurring feature of the American economy for centuries, even during the era of laissez-faire, when government left the economy almost entirely alone. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, eight American recessions worsened into depressions. (For the cure to this free-market malady, see "Government Success Stories.")
The San Francisco Bay Bridge: This is a well-known failure of the invisible hand. Commuters, following their own individual best interests, contribute to a traffic jam that is far worse than if they followed a group-based solution. The details can be found in More.
Savings and Loan Bail-Out: After the Savings & Loan industry was deregulated in 1982, fraud and abuse quickly ran rampant. After 650 S&Ls went under, taxpayers discovered they were left holding a $500 billion bill.
Silicon Breast Implants: Dow Corning and other corporations knew that silicon breast implants were leaky when they marketed them. In 1994, these manufacturers agreed to pay $4.75 billion to 60,000 stricken women - although that sum may rise pending further court action.
The Superfund: After the Love Canal disaster, Congress created the Superfund program to clean up the nation's thousands of toxic dump sites. The polluters responsible are supposed to defray the costs, but corporations sue in court to minimize their liability. Between 1986 and 1989, insurers spent $1.3 billion on Superfund clean-up and litigation -- with $1.2 billion of that going to their lawyers alone!
Three-Mile Island: Improperly trained crews were mostly to blame for the partial meltdown of one of the reactors, which released radiation into the air and water before it was contained. Gordon MacLeod, the Pennsylvania Secretary of Health, was fired after voicing his concern that both the industry's and the state's nuclear accident response plans were grossly inadequate.
The Tobacco Industry: Despite the fact that tobacco kills 420,000 people a year directly, and another 50,000 by second-hand smoke, tobacco companies still spike their cigarettes with nicotine to make them more addictive. Advertising campaigns specifically target teenagers to replace older, dying smokers.
The Toy Industry: American toys are generally manufactured in China, whose workforce includes slave labor. Many of these prisoners are political dissidents under a regime that slaughtered hundreds of democratic protesters at Tianenmen Square. Toy manufacturers think their profits are more important than sanctioning China for its abusive human rights record.
Unnecessary Surgery: Many studies have determined that about 2 to 3 million unnecessary operations are performed each year, resulting in 12,000 to 16,000 deaths. These figures are determined by comparing the surgery rates of doctors who have a profit incentive in recommending surgery to those who do not.
Sweatshops are work environments that possess three major characteristics—long hours, low pay, and unsafe or unhealthy working conditions. Sweatshops have been a factor in the production of goods around the world for centuries, but the globalization of business has led increasing numbers of major corporations to take advantage of low-cost sweatshop labor in developing countries. Recent examples of sweatshop conditions in the garment industry have caused an international outcry by labor leaders, activists, and government officials. Although manufacturers tend to deny it, sweatshops still exist, even in the United States.
THE HISTORY OF SWEATSHOPS
One of the earliest examples of a sweatshop was in the crude textile mills of Ecuador. Spanish conquerors put the native population to work in sweatshop conditions in the manufacture of cloth, rough garments, and assorted textile goods. The use of the term is more recently traced to working conditions in England's emerging manufacturing industries, where women and children sweated in jobs performed under horrid conditions-the work being monotonous, the hours long, and the pay miserably low. The British government established a Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System in 1889, thus publicly exposing the conditions for the first time. With massive immigration into the United States, especially beginning in the late 1880s, sweatshops became common in American cities on the east coast.
Southern and eastern European immigrants were easy prey for manufacturers who paid low wages and provided poor working conditions in factories. In many instances, the newly arrived immigrants were glad to have these sweating jobs at any wage, no matter how low. The situation in many of the new industries was ripe for sweatshops to develop. Social and economic conditions in most cities produced a large population from which to find workers willing to accept any wage and management systems that neglected the workers, thus removing any consideration of the human factor in manufacturing. Generally, workers lacked access to the kind of knowledge and resources that would enable them to overcome the impossible working conditions, while governments, both local and national, were unwilling to intervene on their behalf. Other characteristics of sweatshops included overcrowding, lack of sanitary conditions, no worker breaks or relief, demands to complete a task within a limited period of time, and-as important to the continuance of the sweatshop-the total lack of job security.
EFFORTS TO IMPROVE SWEATSHOPS
Initial efforts to correct or improve sweatshops in the United States began in 1884 with legislation in the state of New York to eliminate the production of tobacco products in homes-a practice common in the cigar industry. Similar state labor laws proved generally ineffective before trade unions were able to bring about slight relief. But it took federal minimum wage and maximum-hours legislation in 1938 before sweat-shops began to disappear.
Making matters worse for the workers, there were few if any advocates for improving sweatshop conditions. The immigrants had virtually no voice in management or government. Many could not read or write-much less read and write in English-and were essentially pawns of often unscrupulous, profit-driven manufacturers. Educational opportunities were seldom available, and moving up the corporate ladder was not an option.
Jacob Riis did much to call attention to the living conditions of many of these workers in 1903 with the publication of How the Other Half Lives, a photojournalistic account of the living conditions in New York's tenements. Although powerful, Riis's photographs did little to address working conditions in U.S. sweatshops. In the eighth edition of their classic study on the United States working class, Labor Problems: A Text Book, published in 1912, Thomas S. Adams and Helen Sumner outlined the three conditions in sweat-shops and added a disturbing fourth-danger to the consumer's health from using goods manufactured in sweatshops. Few American consumers took notice, but union involvement in improving working conditions was quite evident beginning in the 1910s, especially in the garment industry.
Another industry where sweatshop conditions existed (and still do) was the agricultural industry, which employs a great many immigrants (both legal and illegal) for harvesting or picking fruits and vegetables. The working conditions included long day-light hours under a hot California or Florida sun with few or no breaks. Wages were just as miserable and women and children were especially abused. These workers seldom had the means or education to improve their plight, and all desperately needed the money. Once again unions attempted to bring some relief to the workers, and labor battles, including fights and even open warfare, were all too frequent.
SWEATSHOPS IN MODERN INDUSTRY
Sweatshops have not been abolished to this day, as is evident in numerous recent examples in the apparel industry that have brought national attention and government reaction to the issue. Garment manufacturers found new ways to finish goods in factories outside the United States, where labor costs were miniscule but sweatshops flourished. In countries in South and Central America and Asia, such companies found a ready labor supply where wage expectations were low and the sweatshop thrived. Companies like The Gap, Liz Claiborne, Kathie Lee Gifford, Nike, and Wal-Mart all came under criticism for marketing goods produced in sweatshops.
National attention was directed at these and other companies in the apparel industry through media out-lets, and consumers were sometimes advised not to purchase certain brand names. Advocacy groups, particularly vibrant among college students (who got their start by refusing to buy college or university logo merchandise produced in sweatshops), organize consumer awareness of sweatshop conditions and attempt to pressure companies into ceasing their sweatshop-labor practices. A site was mounted on the Internet by Sweatshop Watc—a coalition of labor, community, civil rights, immigrant, and women's organizations (www.sweatshopwatch.com)—to further spread awareness and coalesce activist projects.
The U.S. government has lent its efforts toward eliminating the problem, proposing legislation aimed at ending the use of sweatshop labor in foreign countries. However, the most devastating blow to companies marketing sweatshop goods came in the form of lawsuits filed by the dozens.
Despite the concentrated efforts, negative publicity, and legislative action, the proliferation of sweat-shops continues. Representatives of the New York-based National Labor Committee traveled to El Salvador during 1998 to see firsthand local working conditions. While visiting a factory that made jackets for Liz Claiborne, the group found workers reporting fifteen-hour days, two daily bathroom breaks, and appalling working conditions-all for sixty cents an hour. Women were routinely tested for pregnancy and fired if pregnant. Protestors were fired and overtime was enforced. Suspensions without pay were common. A jacket selling for $198 was manufactured for eight-four cents (leaving labor costs as 0.4 percent of the retail price). If sweatshops are illegal in the United States, critics ask, why are U.S. firms neglecting such offshore conditions among their suppliers of finished goods?
Does a remedy exist? In the United States, the courts are a possible avenue of relief. In May 1999, a Los Angeles court issued subpoenas to seventeen U.S. firms-including The Gap, Wal-Mart, Sears, Tommy Hilfiger, Jones Apparel Group, and Warnaco-seeking over one billion dollars in damages over apparel goods reportedly manufactured in Siapan sweatshops. In February 1999, U.S. garment firms announced support of another one billion dollar suit against sweat-shop factories in the Mariana Islands.
Congress also joined the fight; while a 1997 bill aimed at curbing sweatshops in the garment industry failed, a 1998 House hearing was held to discourage the use of sweatshop labor in the garment industry. In early 1999, a presidential task force finally agreed on a foreign factory monitoring system. The task force-which included representatives of apparel manufacturers, labor unions, and human rights organizations-set forth a voluntary workplace code of conduct that included provisions prohibiting forced labor, harassment or abuse of workers, and discrimination, and provisions supporting worker rights to organize and participate in collective bargaining, minimum wage and benefit guarantees, and a safe and healthy work environment. While the Clinton administration and industry leaders praised the agreement as historic, some people criticized it for making participation voluntary and not addressing the need for workers to receive a basic living wage.
But the problem of sweatshops is likely to deepen. Structural adjustment programs, which are often imposed on developing countries by major financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund, are among the hallmarks of the emerging global economy. These programs, which derive from liberal capitalist economic theories, can act indirectly as barriers against labor laws and labor organization (under the logic that these constitute threats to free trade) while deregulating the flow of foreign investment. Hence, the prevailing social and economic climate makes sweatshop labor not only possible, but attractive (and for some industries, almost necessary).
In addition, the governments of many developing nations are reluctant to enforce strong worker-protection laws. They view cheap labor as one of the major assets they can offer to attract investment by multinational companies, which creates jobs and provides capital for development. These governments argue that all of the major developed nations limited worker rights early in their economic histories, and that they should be allowed to do so as well, with the goal of eventually achieving the prosperity that would enable them to eliminate sweatshops. They also claim that sweatshops often provide the best wages and working conditions available to workers in the developing world, who might otherwise be condemned to prostitution, begging, or subsistence farming.
Meanwhile, popular organizing against sweatshop labor is also gaining momentum. These groups try to capitalize on the knowledge that, if the general public were aware of the conditions in which certain consumer items were produced, they would refrain from buying them. Improved global communications, using such tools as satellite and the Internet, make it easy to disseminate information about the business activities of multinational corporations in developing nations. Activists hope that consumer pressure will force companies to become more socially responsible or face devastating negative publicity, like that experienced by Nike and The Gap.
Co-op America, sponsor of the "No Sweat!" program to end sweatshop labor, recommends that individuals and businesses take the following steps to aid the cause: organize local community groups to support a sweatshop-free purchasing law in local or state government; investigate companies with which you do business and insist they maintain good records on labor issues; use your clout as a shareholder to encourage companies to treat employees fairly; and purchase union-made, local, and fair-trade approved goods. Businesses can submit to workplace monitoring under programs run by the Fair Labor Association, Social Accountability International, or Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production.
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