Worcester, Mass. - The International Studies Stream program at Clark University will present "Women, Labor, and Globalization: Central American Workers Speak Out," from 4 to 6 p.m., Monday, Feb. 19, in the Lurie Conference Room of the Higgins University Center, 950 Main St.
This free, public forum is co-sponsored by the International Development, Community & Environment Department, Government Department and Women's Studies program.
For more information, call 508-793-7181.
Speakers include:
Rosa Isabel Davila Alonzo and Maria Elena Mendina Vallejo are worker-owners of Nueva Vida Women's Sewing Cooperative in Nicaragua. In Nicaragua there are many free trade zones where mainly women work in "sweatshops," producing clothing under unacceptable labor conditions, long hours and low pay. After being flooded out of their homes and neighborhoods near Lake Managua by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, these women were relocated to Nueva Vida, or New Life, a resettlement community that has 80 percent unemployment and underemployment combined. Together with the Jubilee House Community/Center for Development in Central America, a group of women from Nueva Vida envisioned a way to create sustainable employment in the barrio. The cooperative demonstrates the possibility of production without exploitation, of profit which benefits women rather than transnational companies. In 2005, the co-op became the world's first worker-owned free trade zone, allowing them to receive the benefits of free trade zones—tax breaks, duty free import and export—while providing just pay, fair working conditions, and worker control of the workplace.
Gilberto Garcia has documented labor violations, coordinated educational campaigns, and organized international support for El Salvadoran worker struggles since 1994. He started his organizing career as a student in 1987, demanding an end to required military service for youth and children, and a peaceful end to the armed conflict in El Salvador. Since the settlement between the worker union STIT and the Tainan Enterprise company in 2002, he has represented textile workers on the board of Just Garments, a source of "sweatfree" clothing. As founder of the Center of Labor Studies and Support (Centro de Estudios y Apoyo Laboral) in 2001, he documents labor rights violations, provides organizing advice to workers seeking to form unions, and builds international solidarity relationships. Mr. Garcia also organizes as part of a coalition against free trade agreements and promotes alternative forms of community-based development.
Liana Foxvog is the national organizer of SweatFree Communities. SweatFree Communities coordinates a network of grassroots campaigns that promote humane working conditions in apparel and other labor-intensive global industries by convincing both public and religious institutions to adopt sweatshop-free purchasing policies. Using institutional purchasing as a lever for worker justice, the sweatfree movement empowers ordinary people to create a just global economy through local action.