It's a lose-lose situation that's got to change.” “Now we know the consequences of NAFTA-style trade agreements: Ohio workers lose their jobs, and overseas workers are forced to work without pay. “These used to be good Ohio jobs,” said Wanda Taylor, who made shoes in the Nelsonville factory for 25 years and served as the president of UNITE local 146SW. Workers also said that they are trained to deceive monitors that Quan Tak corporate clients send to inspect workplace conditions and that workers who led efforts to improve conditions were fired.
Employees often work 15 hours a day, seven days a week, for as little as $5 a day. Reports from Chinese newspapers indicate that as many as 4000 workers at the Quan Tak factory in Guangzhou went on strike to recover unpaid overtime wages going as far back as 2002. The company, which sells shoes and boots to government departments for municipal employees, postal service workers, and the military, now manufactures the majority of its products in China and the Dominican Republic, paying workers a fraction of the wages they used to pay in Nelsonville. Rocky Shoes & Boots, based in Nelsonville, shut down its unionized manufacturing plant there in 2001. The call comes as the groups exposed workplace abuses in a Rocky Shoes-contracted facility in China, where as many as 4000 workers went on strike last month to protest non-payment of wages. Human rights and labor organizations in Ohio today called on presidential candidates and Governor Ted Strickland to adopt “sweatfree” purchasing policies to stop tax dollar support for sweatshop abuses that have sent thousands of Ohio jobs overseas.
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