After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Disney and other United States-based companies found themselves in the position to create a “new world order.” The National Labor Committee (NLC), Haitian grassroots labor organizers, a multimillion member international labor community, concerned shareholders, members of the U.S. Congress, and activists around the world pressured Disney to lead the way to a new global standard by paying a living wage and investing in local infrastructure wherever it did business. Whatever standards Disney enacted, they argued, the rest would follow. Rather than assume the “corporate mantle of responsibility,” Disney ran from the United States to Haiti, then to China, in search of cheap labor, a bigger profit margin, and the ability to do business without scrutiny. Seeing itself as just one entity in a global garment supply chain, Disney claimed responsibility only for licensing its brand to the contractors (U.S.-based) and subcontractors (in Haiti and later China) who handled the actual production of Disney merchandise.

The United States’ relationship with Haiti symbolizes over one hundred years of “racial capitalism,” a form of economic exploitation steeped in racist, sexist, and imperialist assumptions.Footnote ¹ This essay explores a 1990s version of it, one that casts the Walt Disney Corporation as the imperialist exploiter and reveals the underpinnings of the post-Cold War “New World Order” as it was developing. It examines the multifront campaign launched by unions and other interests to influence the trajectory of “neoliberalism” in the post-Cold War 1990s, the Clinton Administration and Disney's responses, and the consequences of the highly publicized campaign not only for Disney and its contractors and subcontractors but for Americans’ and global consumers’ understanding of acceptable labor conditions.

In the early 1980s, the arrival of thousands of Haitian “boat people” on the Florida coast prompted the Reagan Administration to call on U.S. businesses to intervene. Haiti needed an infusion of U.S. capital investment and U.S. businesses in bigger profit margins. Haitian President Jean-Claude Duvalier, “Baby Doc,” offered fifteen-year tax exemptions while the 1984 Caribbean Basin Initiative enabled finished products to come back into the United States duty-free. A win-win, except for Haitian workers. Haiti became “the Taiwan of the 1980s” with over three U.S. manufactures putting the country's six million unemployed to work at only $2.65/day, the lowest wage available “anywhere in the world.”Footnote ² Gregoire Eugene, the leader of Haiti's Social Christian (opposition) Party, argued that U.S. companies should pay Haitians $6/day instead of offering them “vitamin pills” to supplement their diets.Footnote ³ Eugene's voice was muted by the Cold War's “free enterprise” rhetoric. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, however, not even Disney could create a fantasy magical enough to provide capitalists the cover they needed.Footnote ⁴

Noam Chomsky, Paul Farmer, Michel Trouillot, Mats Lundahl, Alex DuPuy, and Ermitte St. Jacques, among others, leave no doubt that centuries of pillaging at the hands of imperialists have rendered Haitians some of the most beleaguered people in the world. After the U.S. occupation (1915–1934), it looted Haiti of timber opening the door U.S.-based agribusiness to mass produce fruit for export. Over the next thirty years, Haiti's farmers lost control over the land and any kind of sustainable agriculture and were forced to move into urban areas to take work offered by none other than U.S.-based companies. Successive Haitian governments took cuts, businesses paid no taxes, leaving little for infrastructure, health care, or education. Haitians’ demands for basic services were met with repression; the most sustained attempt at labor organizing, prior to the 1990s story told here, occurred in the 1940s—the decade before “Papa Doc” Duvalier came to power. The history is absolutely brutal.Footnote ⁵

After decades of Duvalier repression, “Baby Doc” was overthrown in 1986 by Haitians rioting for food. Four years later, Jean Bertrand Aristide, the Roman Catholic priest who organized a pro-democracy movement, began his tumultuous attempts to rule the country.

Presiding over Haiti three times (1990–1991, 1994–1996, 2001–2004), the first term offered the most promise but lasted only eight months when a military coup led by Raoul Cédras ousted him from power. The coup was rejected by international forces. The United States, United Nations, and the Organization of American States (OAS) imposed three years of tough sanctions and an embargo, all of which failed. Cédras remained in power while manufacturers left Haiti in droves. Over one hundred thousand jobs were lost in the garment, sports, toys, lingerie, electronics, cement (construction), and other industries. Of the forty-four thousand jobs held mostly by Haitian women in 1991 in “assembly,” less than eight thousand remained by 1994.Footnote ⁶

The embargo strategy was designed to force the Haitian elite to abandon Cédras. Instead, Haiti's formal economy was destroyed, “winding the clock back toward the time when there was no electricity, refrigeration or medicine, and few jobs outside of working in the fields.” Said a wealthy businessman, “Washington just doesn't get Haiti. Most of Haiti doesn't need gasoline. It doesn't need factories. The army can hang on for months, maybe longer. They'll run the place on mangoes and bananas before they let Aristide come back.” The Washington Post reported that Haiti's wealthy elite were doing just fine.

The Cédras regime benefitted most. The police chief of Port-Au-Prince built a hillside mansion overlooking the city on his monthly salary of “$500.” The embargo, economists argued, “transformed an economy once partially dependent on smuggling into an economy built on smuggling.”Footnote ⁸ Under these circumstances it is difficult to imagine U.S. businesses operating in any capacity in Haiti except for the fact that both Bush and Clinton exempted only U.S. businesses from the embargo. The continued lure of low wages and the possibility of monopoly proved more than attractive, despite the political tumult.Footnote ⁹ Michel Trouillot argues that the U.S.-Haiti “import-export” bourgeoisie fed on the “disequilibrium” continually created by international intervention.Footnote ¹⁰

The embargo ended when, with assistance from the UN and Untied States, Cédras was removed and Aristide returned to finish his first term. With stability the goal and Aristide now “in agreement,” the International Monetary Fund (IMF) promoted what we now know to be textbook neoliberal economic policies. Privatize state-owned businesses, deregulate the financial sector, downsize “the state,” and liberalize international trade. A global phenomenon in the 1990s, from the United States to Haiti to the former Soviet Union, privatization was touted as an efficient form of economic development, one that provided stability and laid the groundwork for the creation of democratic institutions. The tiny segment of Haiti's public sector developed under Aristide's first eight months was eliminated. “Privatization is all the rage here, too, of public sector, civil servants, school janitors.” Public servants, many of whom were women, lost their stable incomes through the privatization process and were forced back to work for the next-to-nothing wages Disney and its contractors and subcontractors paid.Footnote ¹¹

It was within this context that Batay Ouvriye (“Workers Fight”) and the National Labor Committee (NLC) launched what would become a high-profile campaign for Haitian workers. An example of multinational working-class resistance, Batay and the NLC developed a vast international labor network to combat what was a multinational Disney-led garment supply chain. The post-Cold War multinational context forced Batay to form alliances with populist movements and political parties outside of Haiti.Footnote ¹² Led by Yannick Etienne, Batay had been organizing in Haiti for almost a decade, despite the enormous difficulties. Haitians earned $0.28/hour, about $10.77/week. They each made six hundred $10 T-shirts/day, generating $6,000/day, yet they lived without running water, furniture, or medicine. Over two-thirds of their earnings paid for rent, most of the rest for food supplied outside the factory gates. Schools, all privatized, charged unaffordable tuition forcing children to fend for themselves with $0.40/day.Footnote ¹³ Batay took full advantage of the fact that Haitian workers were making iconic Disney merchandise geared toward kids to pressure Disney, its contractors, and its subcontractors to improve the entirety of the industry.

The National Labor Committee (NLC) was perfectly positioned to join Batay in the campaign. It started in 1980 as a joint effort of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, the United Auto Workers, and the International Association of Machinists to draw attention to El Salvadoran trade unionists who were being assassinated for opposing the country's military-led regime. Hoping to escape “another Vietnam,” the NLC's twenty-three labor organizations openly questioned the role the U.S. government and the AFL-CIO played in the conflict. The NLC spent the rest of the 1980s engaged in human rights campaigns in Central America. Well-known by 1990 when Charles Kernaghan and Barbara Briggs took over, they re-oriented the NLC toward ending sweatshop labor. In 1993, Aristide asked them to evaluate the labor consequences of the 1991 coup and subsequent embargo. Kernaghan and Briggs researched working conditions in Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, and other “off shore” locations to which U.S. businesses were either relocating or subcontracting. According to their statistics, by 1992, eighty-one companies had moved offshore eliminating fifteen thousand U.S. jobs.Footnote ¹⁴

Working out of an office in New York donated by Teamsters Local 111, the two spent much of the 1990s incognito. They posed as business executives, wore “spy” glasses to take pictures clandestinely, all to investigate the conditions under which garments were produced. In press-releases and using the new internet, Kernaghan and Briggs published exposé-type information to the vast network the NLC had built in the 1980s. They created a fake apparel company with Kernaghan the entrepreneur looking for “a good deal” in the emerging free trade zones. The news programs 60 Minutes and Nightline picked up the story. When “CEO” Kernaghan and a 60 Minutes producer traveled to El Salvador as part of an undercover investigation, USAID and its “development contractors” offered Kernaghan a tour of Central America touting the benefits of doing business in the region.Footnote ¹⁵ As Kernaghan put it, U.S. taxpayers paid USAID to encourage U.S.-based companies to move jobs offshore. That, he said, “was how to move a human rights issue.” After the 60 Minutes episode aired, the Clinton-Gore campaign blasted President George Bush “for the tax scam that helped the Decaturville [Sportswear Factory] move to El Salvador.”Footnote ¹⁶

The NLC went so far as to argue that the coup that removed Aristide from power in 1991 was launched to “block President Aristide's wage reforms [as it] came one day before wage rates were to be raised from the existing 21 cents per hour to approximately 50 cents per hour,” an increase opposed by U.S. companies, their contractors, USAID, and the Bush Administration.Footnote ¹⁷ Eighty-seven U.S. companies successfully sought exemptions from the embargo that followed the coup. Each made more money during the embargo as they increased trade with the military dictatorship headed by Cédras, and wage rates fell. “The US companies and their contractors used the bloody repression—the military had killed over 4,000 people—to slash wages [to 14 cents per hour] and destroy all popular, democratic, grassroots movements, especially the nascent labor unions,” argued the NLC.Footnote ¹⁸

Some businesses actually followed a different model. The emerging transnational, post- Cold War, neoliberal version of racial capitalism, what labor activists called “the race to the bottom,” was avoided when business owners accepted a smaller profit margin. The Canadian Multi-Industries manufactured in Haiti but paid two to three times that of U.S.-based companies. Richard Coles said his competitors were “pretending” when they argued they could not afford to pay more. Coles paid his 250 employees between $0.63–$0.83 per hour with a profit margin amounting to $360,000 (7–8 percent). By comparison, George Sassine, the Haitian owner of Gillanex, a Multi-Industries competitor, owned three factories, employed seven hundred workers, and operated at a 12–17 percent profit margin (the average profit margin for U.S.-based production was 5 percent).Footnote ¹⁹

Disney was unwilling to follow Cole's model. By the 1990s—“The Disney Decade”—Michael Eisner and his “dream team” posted profits of over $1.3 billion/year, assets totaling $43 billion, operated retail outlets in Times Square, Paris, Milan, Munich, and in malls across the country, with amusement parks in Paris and one planned for Tokyo.Footnote ²⁰ The stuff of legend, Disney's use of sweatshop labor burst its otherwise shiny bubble. In the 1990s, it was still scandalous to think that a company built on providing kids and adults alike with immeasurable happiness in reality paid wages that prevented some from escaping abject poverty. It was also not yet clear the role the U.S. government could or should play in regulating the emerging “multinational” corporations that grew without any constraints. The NLC argued that Eisner's 1996 $181 million stock option, had it been “redirected” to Haitian workers, would have enabled Disney and its subcontractors to double the wages of 190,000 workers for the next sixteen years.Footnote ²¹

Yet the system worked beautifully for big U.S.-based retailers like Disney. None were directly responsible for employing Haitian “sweatshop” laborers. It was a three-tiered process: Haitian women sewed Disney T-shirts for Haitian manufacturers; Haitian manufacturers contracted with U.S.-based garment firms; U.S.-based firms signed contracts with Disney. Disney was not directly responsible for moving production offshore or paying poverty-wages; its contractors and subcontractors were. Disney, the “the premier licensing organization in the world,” did set the initial price, though, driving the rest of the chain.Footnote ²² Its ability to trademark its characters gave it an enormous amount of control. Manufacturers at every level competed for Disney contracts, delivering merchandise as cheaply as possible while enabling Disney to deny responsibility for its production.

Bringing attention to the conditions under which the garments were produced proved difficult in this system. The Union of Needle Trades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE!) and its predecessors, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, were slow to follow manufacturers to Haiti and elsewhere, which explains their initial absence on the ground and the unusually high profile of the NLC. In their absence, Batay and the NLC employed an embargo-influenced strategy, the idea being to garner outside support in an effort to bring international pressure to bear on working conditions. Their goal was to expose the multiple layers of exploitation that drove Haitians to raft to Florida.

The international approach was necessary not only because the “New World Order” demanded it but also because formal routes inside Haiti were inadequate to address workers’ problems. The Haitian Ministry of Labor was woefully underfunded. The court system was extremely slow. Haitian law did not require any type of external audit so companies kept their own books.Footnote ²³ Businesses preferred this environment. The U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Embassy in Haiti explained that “tax, labor, and health and safety laws and policies are theoretically universally applicable but they are not universally applied and observed. As such, they do not distort or impede the efficient mobilization and allocation of investment.”Footnote ²⁴ The NLC was key, here. In the first few years after the Cold War, it used the new context to shame the United States into acknowledging the role its businesses played exploiting workers at home and, increasingly, abroad. U.S. businesses could no longer use the specter of closed-market communism to argue that democracy followed “free trade.”

To prove that point, the NLC produced “Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti.” Distributed in July of 1996 throughout the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands, the documentary brought Haitian women's stories to the global public. Horrifying, it shows the “hovels” Haitian mothers and their children lived in, some wearing tattered Disney T-shirts. No running water, no working sewage system, nothing to eat. The NLC invited one of the women in the documentary to introduce it but the risks were too great. She bowed out for fear she would lose her job or her children “might fall victim to an ‘accident’ while she was in the U.S.” The film included a “draft model letter” member organizations used as a template. “Disney could afford 58 cents/hour,” what Haitian women workers were asking for, the letter stated. “If Disney were serious about promoting real family values, it should at least pay a living wage . . .” And, Disney was in the position “to reform an entire industry.” “Mr. Eisner, Disney can make a world of difference if you do the right thing!” “Come with us to Haiti, hear the stories of these workers and see first-hand how they live. Is this too much to ask? Disney should stand up for these workers.”Footnote ²⁵ The NLC assumed Eisner would be as horrified as its members were about the conditions. “Meet the workers in a safe location,” the letter encouraged Eisner, “where they will not be fired for speaking the truth” to talk about “a very modest wage increase so the workers and their families could climb out of debt.”Footnote ²⁶

By then Kernaghan was a well-known late-twentieth century muckraker. While the “Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti” DVD was in the last stages of production, he brought Kathie Lee Gifford to tears on national television when she was forced to answer questions about the conditions under which her $300-million-dollar Walmart clothing line was manufactured. The face of morning talk show, “Live with Regis and Kathie Lee!,” she proclaimed on May 1, 1996, “I truly resent this man impugning my integrity. You can say I'm ugly, you can say I'm not talented, but when you say that I don't care about children, that I exploit them for some sort of monetary gain, for once mister you better answer your phone because my attorney is calling you today, how dare you!” Her exhortation was met with a round of applause from the live studio audience.

Kernaghan and Briggs responded by bringing one of the fifteen-year-old girls who sewed “Kathie Lee” garments in Honduras to testify in front of Congress. Those of us alive then will be hard pressed not to remember the scandal. Now not able to deny that impoverished children produced her clothing line, Kathie Lee and her football star husband, Frank Gifford, traveled to Chinatown to dole out $300 in cash to people sewing other parts of the garments, a picture of 1990s neoliberalism at its finest.Footnote ²⁷ The NLC was at the peak of its influence and worked then with Batay to put some hard international pressure on Disney.

In the midst of the Kathie Lee debacle and with Disney, Walmart, and K-Mart's merchandise production under heavy scrutiny, the Clinton Administration initiated the Apparel Industry Partnership in August of 1996. Eighteen businesses, organizations, and labor and human rights groups discussed how to improve conditions across the garment manufacturing industry, not just within the United States but now on a global scale. Ironically, the global sweatshop became the focus only because U.S.-based manufacturers had moved offshore, the very situation the Apparel Industry Partnership was supposed to investigate as if it were a problem associated with the countries in which the manufacturing was being done.

Liz Claiborne, Nike, L.L. Bean, Reebok, Nicole Miller, Patagonia, the National Consumers’ League, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, UNITE, the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), and the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights were among the eighteen assembled. Six months into the discussions, the New York Times reported a split. Labor and human rights groups pushed for a forty-eight-hour week, an end to child labor under the age of fifteen, and a “basic needs” wage rate. Manufacturers countered with a sixty-hour week and argued that a “basic wage rate” was “murky” because, manufacturers said, it was “difficult” to determine what a living wage would be across borders. Child labor, manufacturers said, was sometimes necessary “because in many impoverished countries, families put 12, 13, and 14 year olds to work to help make ends meet.” A living wage, they argued further, “might be too expensive” to maintain. Of course, this is why companies began subcontracting in the first place as they took advantage of the fluidity the post-Cold War era offered. The group continued to debate the specifics of what they referred to as a “basic needs proposal.”Footnote ²⁸

The high-profile scrutiny continued. Another news program, this time Dateline, investigated Disney's garment and toy production facilities in Indonesia and China that same fall. While not specific to Haiti, Dateline's undercover investigations made hay of Disney's arguments that it “set high human rights standards for its offshore contractors” and monitored each “rigorously.” Girls as young as “the fifth grade” worked more than twelve hours per day, using substandard equipment behind locked doors making Disney stuffed animals. In China's Xiangjiang Province, “a half million migrant female workers eat, sleep and work in factory compounds for just over a dollar a day” and lived in dormitories sixteen to a room, the investigation revealed. The toys they produced entered the United States tariff free.Footnote ²⁹ The path to China was opening.

Then came “Disney Week” that same fall of 1996, during which sixty organizations, kids from fourteen states, the District of Columbia, Haiti, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan leafletted, wrote letters, engaged in teach-ins all to pressure Disney to respond. Religious groups launched letter writing campaigns emphasizing the immorality associated with profiting from people's misery. Presbyterian minister and labor organizer David Dyson, a former United Farm Workers’ organizer who worked alongside Caesar Chavez and who led the NLC in the 1980s, warned Eisner that “Disney will be named from our pulpits . . . until you hear us.” The Presbyterian Church invested heavily in Disney stock. Dyson urged Disney to honor its 154,000-share commitment by ensuring the people who produced its merchandise were paid a living wage. The Progressive Asset Management group (PAM), “socially responsible investors,” and the United Methodist Church went a bit further calling for a shareholder resolution demanding Disney review its sourcing guidelines and prove that it was monitoring.Footnote ³⁰

It was the shareholders’ resolution that put Disney on the defensive. Disney lodged a complaint with the Security Exchange Council (SEC), arguing that the issues raised in the proposed proxy fell “squarely within the purview of normal business operations.”Footnote ³¹ Surprisingly, within a few weeks, Disney dropped the SEC complaint. PAM and the Methodists drew up two resolutions for the upcoming February 1997 shareholders’ meeting calling for Disney to report to its shareholders its “contractor supplier standards,” to review the compliance mechanisms of its contractors and subcontractors in “the countries where it sources,” to pay a “sustainable wage,” and to produce “comparisons of compensation packages for company officers with both the lowest and average wages for Disney contract workers in the US and three low wage countries, including Haiti.”Footnote ³²

Newspapers across the country then engaged in an incredible discussion of the morality of transnational business practices. They put the spotlight on Disney, K-Mart, and other retailers whose garments were produced in Haiti, Jamaica, Honduras, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and, increasingly, China under similarly exploitive conditions. Kernaghan was quoted extensively.

The point, he said, was for consumers to pressure Disney, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, but especially Disney, to take a hard line against exploitation. “Disney can afford to pay more,” he argued. If it did, other companies would follow. Kernaghan pled, “We do not want Disney to move out of Haiti. Neither do workers down there. They want work, they need it.”Footnote ³³

Senatora John Conyers (D-Mich) stepped in next. In early 1997, his office initiated a high-profile letter writing campaign urging Disney not to move out of Haiti. Why not join the Clinton Administration's Apparel Industry Partnership, he and his cosigners asked, and come up with a better solution? Disney refused, arguing that what Haitian workers were paid through its subcontractors amounted to “at least twice the Haitian minimum,” that the wage had doubled over the previous year (1996–1997), and that Disney “was not an employer in Haiti.”

When we license our images to third parties in the United States and around the world, we require that they follow all applicable employment and environmental laws. Violation of any law is grounds for immediate termination of the contract. Before any licensing contract can be renewed, licensees must certify that manufacturing has been conducted according to the law.

Conyers wrote in response that the Apparel Industry Partnership had “established an extremely reasonable and voluntary code of conduct which requests that wages meet workers’ basic needs, that overtime pay is compensated, and prohibits forced and child labor.” He encouraged Eisner to bring Disney into the organization as other companies had joined not only because it was the moral thing to do but because consumers preferred it and it was good for business.Footnote ³⁴

Instead, Disney tried to shift the public's attention to the fourth annual “Children's Summit” to be held at Disneyland-Paris in June of 1997. Organized by the United Nation's Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the goal of the summit was to craft a “children's social charter.” The NLC's Kernaghan suggested UNESCO get “real kids involved . . . if not child workers then perhaps the children of maquila workers.”Footnote ³⁵ The previous UNESCO summits, also sponsored by Disney, were feel good gatherings—six hundred children from thirty countries—whose attendance depended upon their winning local competitions.Footnote ³⁶ According to Disney’ promotional material:

The first summit was held in 1994, “thanks to the Disney Magazine,” which held a contest in “late 1993, inviting children to express their ideas about friendship.”Footnote ³⁸

Given the summit's Paris location, the European labor community began exerting some pressure. Together, representing 668 affiliated organizations containing over 154 million workers (of whom 23 million were teachers) in over 140 countries, the 124 million member International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the 23 million union-teacher member Education International (EI), and the 8 million member International Textile, Garment, and Leather Workers’ Federation (ITGLWF) organized letter-writing campaigns and demonstrations. While the AFL-CIO-Paris joined the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) in planning a counter press conference to that held by Disney/UNESCO, the presidents of the ICFTU and ITGLWF wrote directly to Michael Eisner criticizing Disney for its exploitive business practices. The EI's public support was particularly important because its teachers participated in the summit in previous years and UNESCO considered it a consultant.Footnote ³⁹ Michele Briones, of UNITE's international office, suggested a meeting between UNESCO, ITGLWF, and ICFTU representatives to discuss and “spread the word about Disney's exploitation of workers to many people throughout the world.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Fred von Leetuven, General Secretary of the ICFTU implored Federico Mayor, Director General of UNESCO, to “do everything in his power to investigate the facts and call for immediate measure to be taken to ensure decent working conditions and wages for workers manufacturing Disney products. The Children's Summit, the children who have been invited themselves, and UNESCO's goodwill should not serve to conceal the exploitation of these workers,” he wrote.Footnote ⁴¹

Several international trade unions and organizations released statements. The European Trade Union Federation of Textiles, Clothing and Leather condemned several of Disney's business practices including the wages it paid women in Haiti, Indonesia, and China and the “loss of 2700 union jobs in the United States” to “non-union temporary jobs.” It demanded Disney create a “Global Works Council” to “bring together all workers directly employed by Disney,” that it “cease all union activity and respect the core standards of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in all countries where Disney has a presence” and, finally, that Disney “publicly commit itself to the normal rehabilitation and entry into school of all children found to be employed by contractors producing Disney merchandise.”Footnote ⁴² It was an international, labor-led, high-profile pressure campaign, with the ICFTU, the AFL-CIO on both continents, UNITE, the ICFTU, the ITGLWF, and others, demanding that Disney force the rest of the garment industry to set a better standard.Footnote ⁴³

In the end, just as the ICFTU and ITGLWF feared, the summit glossed over labor conditions despite the international pressure.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nothing significant with regard to wages and conditions was discussed, no “children's charter” adopted. By 1999, UNESCO had turned its attention to online pornography.Footnote ⁴⁵ At no point has the UN's “Convention on the Rights of the Child” required its signatories to ban child labor much less create a real floor for working conditions and wages. It simply states that children have a right to an adequate standard of living.Footnote ⁴⁶

Back in the United States, the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians of the Communication Workers of America, Local 57 (NABET-CWA) organized a demonstration outside of the “gala” premiere of Hercules on June 25, 1997, on the heels of the Paris summit, to protest Disney/ABC's cuts to wages, health care, retirement, and the company's hiring temporary workers. NABET-CWA, Local 57 painted a broad picture of Disney/ABC's mistreatment, attempting to appeal to parents bringing their kids to the movies. “The image you have of Disney is not accurate,” said Dave Mahoney, secretary-treasurer of NABET-CWA, Local 57. “Before they take their children to see Hercules, parents need to know that the Disney image is very much at odds with how this company treats working families in real life. There is a very clear pattern of widespread Disney/ABC mistreatment of workers—refusing to provide retiree health care and union busting here in the U.S. and use of child labor and sweatshops abroad. We think the public–especially parents–have a right to know the real Disney and they're not going to like what they see.” The demonstration was supported by Los Angeles County labor unions, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, and the National Hispanic Media Coalition.Footnote ⁴⁷

With the heat on, Senator John Conyers rallied his colleagues to participate in a “National Day of Conscience.” Planned for October 3, 1997, Conyers intended to bring Batay's Etienne to the Senate for a staff briefing. She was to tour Washington under the auspices of the faith-based group Witness for Peace, which had been working in Latin America and the Caribbean for over fifteen years to try and bring some awareness to the “cheap” labor situation in developing countries. Conyers encouraged his colleague to attend. “I believe,” he wrote, “that Haiti is at an important crossroads and that foreign investment will be critical to this country's economic recovery,” a refrain repeated for at least a century. He went on, “we must promote sustainable development that for economic, political, and moral reasons, does not tolerate exploitation.” He continued, “I believe we need to send a strong message that workers everywhere are entitled to decent conditions and that this reflects a new international consensus both in the political sphere and increasingly among businesses.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The movement was losing steam: Etienne's speaking tour never materialized and the National Day of Conscience a blip.

Meanwhile, Batay had been working on the ground to bring Disney's contractors and subcontractors to the bargaining table. For seven months (February–September, 1997) it requested meetings with the managements of Disney's subcontractors, eventually through a lawyer, to no avail. BVF Apparel not only refused to respond to Batay's requests but fired two workers—one the secretary of the union, another its general coordinator. Both women, the secretary was fired for supposedly “tearing up garments” and the general coordinator for “not showing up for work” one day after she had been locked out by the head supervisor.Footnote ⁴⁹ Disney's representatives, the NLC reported, told one of the fired employees, Odette Denier, “that ‘they were on her side.’” BVF workers hoped Disney would intervene but Disney's reassurance was just lip service.Footnote ⁵⁰ By November of 1997, BVF had fired 150 of 500 workers who manufactured Disney merchandise for engaging in protests. BVF's owner, Allain Villard, denied the workers were arbitrarily fired. Batay and the NLC (now part of the Disney/Haiti Social Justice campaign) demanded Eisner and Villard raise the wage from $0.28/hour to at least $5/day, improve the substandard conditions, and end sexual harassment.Footnote ⁵¹ BVF contracted with U.S.-based Waterbury, which was among the fourteen firms that filled orders for Disney.Footnote ⁵² Not convinced Waterbury or any of the other U.S.-based companies were monitoring conditions in the Haitian maquiladoras, the Clinton Administration sent its own investigators in October of 1997. Workers reported this was “the first time” any had been investigated, despite Disney's and its U.S.-based contractors’ claims.Footnote ⁵³

LVMyles was one of the few U.S.-based companies that did not subcontract. Though not the largest among the garment manufacturers, LVMyles supplied the bulk of the Disney-labeled garments.Footnote ⁵⁴ Its owner, Paul Miller, inherited the business from his father, Sydney. It was Sydney who, in the mid-1950s, began contracting and manufacturing with the big chains, including JCPenney and Walmart, specializing in cartoon-character clothing for women and children.Footnote ⁵⁵ The New York-based manufacturer employed over one thousand people directly, mostly women, in the “Sopias Industrial Park” in Port-au-Prince for between $0.28–$0.35 per hour (between $11–$15 per week), a wage that amounted to half of what was the “minimum living wage” in Haiti. They told Clinton's investigators that LVMyles upped their quota back to 1,800 (!) garments/day, cut back years earlier because 1,800 was considered “inhumane,” and that they suffered various pressure-tactics including sexual harassment. If they needed a bathroom break, water, to leave a few minutes early, the boss would ask for “something” in return.Footnote ⁵⁶

Instead of improving conditions and setting a global standard, Disney and its U.S.-based contractors began to move operations out of Haiti. HH Cutler was one of the first. Headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at its height the company subcontracted with ten assembly plants in Haiti with over twenty-three hundred workers manufacturing clothing for American labels. Overall, 75 percent of the jobs Cutler created were “offshore” either in Haiti, Mexico, or, increasingly after the scrutiny, south and southeast Asia including Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and China. Because of the murkiness of what was becoming an American “multinational,” Cutler was not, under “local” law, required to disclose the companies with whom it was severing ties. Haitian workers had no idea they were being fired and replaced with workers in other parts of the world. Batay, the NLC, and its network could only pressure Cutler to stay in Haiti and disclose the names of the companies affected by the move. The Disney/Haiti Social Justice network encouraged its members to write to both Tom Austin, Cutler's president, and Michael Eisner. To Austin, “we urge you not to pull your contract production from Haiti or the U.S. . . . it is the wrong thing to do” and to Eisner, “Thousands of desperately needed jobs are at stake. These workers who have sewn garments for years deserve better treatment than this. Human rights and human values should be every bit as important to a corporation as its bottom line.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Austin, who took Cutler over in mid-1995, initiated both moves, from Michigan to Haiti to China, all within three years. The Grand Rapids Press sent journalist Mary Ann Sabo to investigate Cutler's Haitian-contracted production facilities. Her first installment focused on two people: Ruth Puckett who worked for Cutler in Grand Rapids for $6.50/hour in 1995, and her Haitian counterpart Abibold Remi, who now did the same work for $0.30/hour ten months later. “How much responsibility,” Sabo asked, “do companies like Grand Rapids-based Cutler, which makes clothes for Disney, have for the lives of workers like Remi and Puckett?” Austin thought none. “Individual people make individual bargains about what their labor is worth,” he argued.

Was he exploiting Remi? Austin said, no, “it's a living wage . . . there's a whole bunch of people who are unemployed and those people are living. We live in a market economy and the market determines what wages are, it's the most effective allocator of resources,” the same reasoning he used when moving production to China.Footnote ⁵⁸

Cutler contracted with Gillanex, a Haitian-owned company that stood to lose a great deal of business with Cutler's move to China. George Sassine, its owner, “epitomized the new breed of Haitian entrepreneur,” Sabo wrote, “self-assured, American educated, politically active.” Sassine was president of Haiti's “Center for Enterprise and Democracy,” the group that worked with the Haitian Parliament “for political and social reform.” Sassine had been in the apparel industry for twenty-five years at that point, having started in 1972 working for a U.S.-based company before he opened his own business in Haiti. He lived through Haiti's peak, with fifty thousand people working in the garment industry in 1987 to a low of four hundred in 1994 after the coup and embargo. By 1996, the numbers were climbing again, “we survived, doing something right,” he said in his interview with Sabo. The Haitians who worked for Gillanex, he explained, earned wages, were provided weekly doctor's visits, medications, and loans for their children's education. “I'm father, nurse, and godfather,” he explained. Sassine was frustrated with Kernaghan's campaign. “If [Kernaghan] continues,” he said, “it's Haiti that's getting stigmatized. One morning you're going to have Mr. Walmart saying I don't want my stuff made it Haiti.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Fellow Haitian business owner Marie-Claude Bayard, whose Classic Apparel had sewn for Cutler for nine years, agreed. She blamed the NLC for too intense a focus, arguing the negativity it brought to Haiti was what prompted Cutler to leave. Haitian contractors had “always had a good relationship with Congress,” she argued. “It's okay to come and do certain things if you see something is wrong,” she said of the NLC and the international scrutiny. “It's another thing to make a campaign where you upset everything and the end result is totally negative.”Footnote ⁶⁰ She said Kernaghan should “fight in his own country” or in the “hell holes of Saigon.” Union organizers at Classic Apparel attempted to negotiate for paid transportation, a cafeteria, better toilets, a second worker to cut thread while the first sewed, and a doubling of their wages to $4.80/day. Bayard said she was “all for the union,” but wished for one that was “more progressive,” one that cooperated with management and “not just tell me the piece rate was no good.”Footnote ⁶¹

In the end, Sabo and the editorial staff of the Grand Rapids Press let Austin off the hook. They found the Cutler factories to be clean, well lit, and well ventilated. The four people they interviewed “at random” were frustrated only by the low wages Cutler paid. “No one,” Mike Lloyd, the editor of the paper wrote, “complained about overwork or abuse,” there were no children working, Cutler was not violating any health and safety regulations. The real problems arose from the “living conditions overall.” There's no running water or electricity, unemployment in Haiti is over 50 percent, those, Sabo argued, were what was driving the impossible situation workers found themselves in. “Do we have,” Lloyd asked, “any right to expect any company's social obligations to go any further?”Footnote ⁶²

Neal Kearney of the ITGLWF argued yes. Kearney encouraged ITGLWF's affiliates to “write, fax, call and send delegations to Disney and HH Cutler” to urge the companies to stay in Haiti rather than “force poor developing nations to compete against each other to attract jobs.”Footnote ⁶³ He wrote Eisner directly arguing that Cutler's move to China would amount to only a few cents more profit per garment. The real reason for the move, he surmised, was to avoid scrutiny. “No doubt,” he wrote, “there is hope and expectation that by switching to China the repressive regime there will provide protection from such criticism.” Kearney assured Disney that “the subcontracting operation in China will be carefully monitored and the abuses of workers’ rights will be highlighted even more dramatically that [sic] was the case in Haiti.” Disney, Kearney argued, “has very considerable power to influence where HH Cutler produces.” He told Eisner to find another licensee if Cutler refuses, that the “workers who have sewn Disney garment [sic] for years deserve better treatment than this.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Kearny sent a similar letter to Tom Austin adding “saving a couple of cents on the price of a product hardly compensates for massive job loses [sic] and gross abuses of workers’ rights.”Footnote ⁶⁵

With the move to China, Austin was in search, he said, of “the complete package.” The complete package included start-finish garment production.Footnote ⁶⁶ In Asia, clothing could be produced in its entirety under one roof, decreasing the cost by at least $0.02–$0.03/garment.Footnote ⁶⁷ Wages in China amounted to half what Haitian workers received. It made good business sense to move, “we're trying to react to the market . . . to grow our business and get it made in the best place,” said Austin. “I'm not in the position,” he continued, “to change the wages around the world or decide the fairness, I wouldn't if I could. We live in a market economy and the market determines what the wages are and it is the most effective allocation of resources.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In the new global, transnational economy there was no entity that could regulate working conditions, pay, or movement from one country to the next. Any government that regulated simply prompted the move to a more business-friendly country. President Clinton, Senator Conyers, humanitarian pressure, none was enough. By mid-October 1997, Conyers’ committee sent Eisner a letter expressing its disappointment that Cutler was moving its operations to China. “We are writing to express our disappointment,” he wrote, “that the HH Cutler Company, one of the fourteen factories producing clothing for Disney, has decided to leave Haiti.” Conyers assured Eisner that the same level of scrutiny would be leveled against Cutler and other of the Disney “licensees” in China, although that would prove impossible.Footnote ⁶⁹

Kearney and the ITGLWF refused to relent. During the spring of 1998, the ITGLWF began distributing Disney's own labor codes to labor and other organizations around the world in an effort to standardize work conditions using Disney's own standards. They were distributed in multiple languages, including Creole.Footnote ⁷⁰ Disney pledged to respect individual rights and safeguard the environment, was “committed to standards of excellence in every aspect of our business and in every corner of the globe,” and to ethical and responsible conduct in all of its operations. The code listed a “minimum” in employment practices including no child labor under the age of fifteen (or fourteen in some areas); no involuntary labor including indentured servitude (!); no discrimination (it used Title VII's categories); a safe environment including proper lighting, sanitation, and ventilation; and that contractors compensate employees according to “all applicable wage and hour laws and regulations.” Disney's code suggested a forty-eight-hour work week with additional hours compensated by something akin to overtime and one day off “in every seven, except under extraordinary business circumstances,” and even included the right to organize.Footnote ⁷¹ In the end, the Disney's own professed standards were, like the Apparel Industry Partnership's recommendations, simply unenforceable lists. No entity, including the UN, the IMF, or the WTO, has yet attempted to regulate transnational business practices.

While the ITGLWF was distributing Disney's own code of conduct and with Cutler and BVF out of the spotlight, the Haitian company Megatex found itself in the hot seat. The same story unfolded: Megatex's employees demanded union representation; Michel Liautaud, its owner, initially refused; he agreed to meet with Batay six months later only if it negotiated “non- economic issues”; and he fired the people who had been talking to the union. Up for negotiation were potable and cool drinking water, “respect,” an environment free of intimidation, an allowance for children's school tuition, wide-open doors during break times, clarifying how much money was deducted for insurance, and the union's status. In the end, Liautaud agreed to provide cool, potable water, to keep the exit door open, to clean the toilets, and to meet with the union weekly.Footnote ⁷² Incensed, in another letter to Michael Eisner, the Campaign for Labor Rights (CLR), part of the Disney/Haiti Social Justice network, suggested Disney provide the “conscience” necessary to force its contractors and subcontractors to improve conditions or risk further international pressure.”Footnote ⁷³

There was no conscience, and no systematic monitoring of conditions at Megatex or any of the other manufactories, despite Disney's claims and the Clinton Administration's brief attempts. Jean-Baptist Sobner, director of the Haitian Ministry of Labor, begged the NLC to continue investigating. The ministry had no cars, “no way to get places.” “If your organization could give a little push for our Ministry to function normally, it would be to everybody's advantage” to which Renar Hedoville, its regional director added, “We are paralyzed.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Eventually the U.S. Embassy stepped in to investigate the situation at Megatex but its “investigations” were USAID-type tours designed to entice businesses to Haiti. It left a card with Liautaud “asking him to pass it along to Etienne's Batay with a request to talk.” By July of 1998, embassy personnel were accompanying Disney representatives and potential contractors “interested in producing garments in Haiti” on “monitoring visits.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Over the next year, Disney shareholders attempted, again, to exert some pressure. In February of 1999, members of the “As You Sow” Foundation (AYS) solicited votes for a shareholder resolution to be included in the 1999 Disney proxy statements. It asked those holding “more than 1 million shares of Disney stock” to support the “Contract Suppliers Shareholder Resolution” or send a letter to Michael Eisner directly. AYS claimed one out of six Disney shareholders supported improving conditions, particularly in Haiti. The resolution required Disney submit a yearly report on the progress it made in three areas: enforcement of its own code of conduct among its contractors, placement of independent monitors to ensure standards were being met, and proof that employees were earning a living wage. “Call your mutual fund manager” and ask them to vote on the Disney resolution by the February 23 deadline.Footnote ⁷⁶

National Public Radio ran a segment on Disney, just as Cutler was moving production to China, as part of a series on the global economy. In its first analysis, David Welna concluded (having not interviewed Etienne or anyone from the human rights and labor groups working on the campaign), that it was the pressure the human rights groups put on the manufacturers that drove them out of Haiti. Welna did not question multinational business practices even when, in a follow up interview, Etienne argued that the real problem “was the minimum wage has become the maximum . . . we want these jobs but not under any conditions.” Welna again concluded that there was really “nothing Disney could do” as it had to “compete.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Millions of people together put an enormous amount of pressure on Disney to create a new set of global standards, some kind of floor. By October, 1999 students were protesting sweatshop conditions as part of a “National Day of Conscience” on the eve of the WTO protests in Seattle, but the ever-elusive actual improvement in conditions never materialized. Absent the Cold War fight against Communism, it became much clearer that U.S.-based companies did not spread democracy worldwide but starvation. As early as 1997, Disney's contractors, refusing to “take the heat,” moved to China to escape the world's scrutiny. None had any intention of abiding by an apparel industry partnership or otherwise bucking under massive international pressure. They were no different than their predecessors of decades earlier as racial capitalism continued its quest for cheap labor and massive profits.Footnote ⁷⁸

After Disney and its contractors left Haiti, a new form of racial capitalism, aka “disaster capitalism,” emerged in the form of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that now coordinate the millions of dollars of aid that flow into impoverished, disaster-prone, areas. Not unlike USAID's efforts to promote development capital in the 1980s and 1990s, NGOs, one critic argues, are “tools used by multilateral organizations to impose their vision of development, representative democracy, and privatization, ‘liberalism in its most savage form.’”Footnote ⁷⁹ Whether development capitalism, racial capitalism, disaster capitalism, or imperialism in prior centuries, the end result is the same: white wealth built on Black poverty. Disney slipped through its own decade reaping untold profits from a garment supply chain that put its mostly white executives at the top and mostly Black Haitian women and their children at the bottom. It could have used its influence to structure the newly emerging global economy more equitably. Imagine if Disney enforced its own code of conduct? It had more influence than any one governmental entity but chose the neoliberal interpretation that was emerging, that businesses had “no choice,” they “had to compete.”

Disney and other U.S. retailers spent the mid-1990s under merciless scrutiny by a robust multinational working-class movement that shattered any belief in the benefits of the “free” market and helped us understand the contours of racial capitalism on a global scale. Yet, in the end, Disney's involvement in Haiti in the 1990s dashed activists’ hopes that public shaming, the only weapon they had absent the ability to pass international regulations, would bring a moral sensibility to the way in which American big business operated. We now know that international regulation, as impossible as it seems to achieve, is the only effective method by which to curtail capitalist exploitation. Even the US’ Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen has called for a global corporate minimum tax rate to blunt the effects of the neoliberal policies Disney and other US businesses promulgated starting in the time period under consideration here.Footnote ⁸⁰