No Sweat
May 3rd, 2000By Naomi Klein It was May Day when a leaked copy of the Retail Council of Canada's master plan to eliminate sweatshops came through my fax machine. London was rioting, two million people were protesting in Japan, and workers were smashing rice bowls in Hong Kong. As I read this feather-light document, designed, it proudly states, to assure "customers that the goods they buy are not produced under exploitative, inhumane or illegal working conditions," all I could do was laugh. Unlike tougher codes in Europe, and even the one just adopted by the University of Toronto, it said nothing about transparency, independent monitoring, or a living wage. The retailers of Canada, it seems, are going to stop the sweatshop epidemic with nothing but bad blood and good intentions. In June, 1998, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lloyd Axworthy was presented with a petition signed by 30,000 Canadians. It demanded that he convene a task force, much as the Clinton administration had done in the United States, to address the rise of sweatshop abuses in Canada and overseas. Representing a coalition of labour, human rights and church groups was the Ethical Trading Action Group (ETAG). Speaking for 8,500 Canadian retailers,...