The Corporation Page #3

labour committee

here in the garment area

of New York City.

It's a little

bit dishevelled.

These are all from

different campaigns.

To make this stuff

concrete as possible

we purchased all of

the products from the factories

that we're talking about.

This shirt sells

for $14.99.

And the women who made

this shirt got paid $0.03.

Liz Claiborne jackets

made in El Salvador

The jackets are $178

and the workers were

paid $0.74

for every jacket they made.

Alpine car stereos

$0.31 an hour.

It's not just sneakers.

It's not just apparel.

It's everything.

We were in Honduras

and some workers they knew

what kind of work we did

and they approached

us and said

conditions in our

factory are horrible.

Will you please

meet with us.

And we said we would.

But you cant meet in

the developing world

you cant walk up in

a factory with your notebook

and workers come

up and interview them.

I mean there's

goons there's spies

the military police

so you do everything

in a clandestine manner.

We are about

to start the meeting

and in walk three guys

very tough looking guys.

The company had found

out about our meeting

and sent these spies.

Obviously we didn't

have the meeting.

But these young girls

were really bright

And as they

were leaving

away from the eyesight

of the spies

they started to put their hands

underneath the table.

And I put my hand

under there

and they put into my hand

their pay stubs.

So wed know

who they were

what they were paid

and the labels that

they made in the factory

so wed know who

they worked for.

So I took my hand

after everyone had left.

And in the palm

of my hand

was the face was of

Kathy Lee Gifford

And on the bottom

of it was

A portion of the proceeds

from the sale of this garment

would be donated to various

children's charities.

Very touching

gets you right here.

Wal-Mart is telling you

if you purchase these pants

and Kathy Lee

is telling you

if you purchase

these pants

you will be

helping children.

The problem was

the people that

handed us this label

were 13 years of age.

Do many people

in your family work here?

Just me.

How many people

do you support?

Eight people?

And how do you do it with

that salary is it enough?

No.

Let's look at it from

a different point of view

Let's look at it

from a point of view

of the people in Bangladesh

who are starving to death.

The people in China

who are starving to death

and the only thing that they

have to offer to anybody

that is worth anything

is their low

cost labour.

And in effect what

they're saying to the world

is they have this big

flag that says

Come over and hire us.

We will work

for $0.10 an hour.

Because $0.10 an hour

will buy us the rice

that's wanted not

to starve.

And come and rescue us

from our circumstance.

And so when Nike comes in

they are regarded by

everybody in the community

as an enormous godsend.

Hey wait!

You are not

permitted to be here!

The door was wide open.

No no no no no.

That's my clothes.

Those are my clothes.

This is not your clothes.

Why your camera!?

Don't touch the woman.

Why!?

This is a private company.

Without permission

how can you come here?

Yes well the door

was wide open

The doors

for employees

not for you.

We went through

the garbage dump

in the Dominican

Republic.

We always do this

kind of stuff

we dig around.

One day we found

a big pile

of Nikes internal

pricing documents.

Nike assigns a time

frame to each operation.

They don't talk

about minutes.

They break the timeframe into

ten thousandths of a second.

You get to the bottom

of all 22 operations;

they give the workers 6.6

minutes to make the shirt.

It's $0.70 an hour

in the Dominican Republic.

That's 6.6 minutes

equals $0.08.

These are Nikes documents.

That means the wages come to

three tenths of one percent

of the retail price.

This is the reality.

It's the science

of exploitation.

What happens in the areas

where these corporations

go in and are successful?

They soon find that they cant

do anymore in that country

because the wages

are too high now.

And what's that another

way of saying

well the people are

no longer desperate.

So okay we've used up

all the desperate people there

they're all plump and

healthy and wealthy.

Let's move on to the next

desperate lot and employ them

and raise their level up.

Well the whole idea of

the export processing zone

is that it will be the

first step towards

this wonderful

new development

through the investment that's

attracted to these countries

there will be

a trickle down effect

into the communities.

But because so many countries

are now in the game

of creating these

free trade enclaves

they have to keep providing

more and more incentives

for companies to come to their

little denationalized pocket.

And the tax holidays

get longer.

So the workers rarely

make enough money

to buy

three meals a days

let alone feed

their local economy.

Something happened in 1940

which marked the beginning

of a new era.

The era of the ability

to synthesize and create.

On an unlimited scale

new chemicals that had

never existed before

in the world.

And using the

magic of research

oil companies compete

with each other

in taking the petroleum

molecule apart

and rearranging it into

well you name it...

So suddenly it became possible

to produce any new chemical

synthetic chemicals

the likes of which had never

existed before in the world

for any purpose and

at virtually no cost.

Fabrics toot brushes

tires insecticides

cosmetics weed killers.

A whole galaxy of things to

make a better life on earth.

For instance if you wanted

to go to a chemist and say

look I want to have

a chemical say a pesticide

which will persist

throughout the food chain

and I don't want to have

to renew it very very often

Id like it to be

relatively non-destructible

and then he'd put two

benzene molecules

on the blackboard and

add a chlorine here

and a chlorine there

that was DDT!

When the eighth army needed

Jap civilians to help them out

in our occupation

they called on native

doctors to administer DD under the supervision

of our men

to stand a potential

typhus epidemic.

Dusting like this goes a long

way in checking disease

and the laughs on them.

"Pardon our dust"

As the petrochemical

era grew and grew

warning signs emerged that

some of these chemicals

could pose hazards.

The data initially were

trivial anecdotal

but gradually a body of data

started accumulating

to the extent that we now know

that the synthetic chemicals

which have permeated

our workplace

our consumer products

our air our water

produced cancer

and also birth defects

and some other

toxic effects.

Furthermore industry

has known about this

at least most industries

have known about this

and have attempted

to trivialize these risks.

If I take a gun and shoot

you that's criminal.

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