AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the war and peace report. I'm Amy Goodman.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s "Made in America" week, according to the White House. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the war and peace report. I'm Amy Goodman.
This is President Trump speaking earlier this week.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’re here today to celebrate American manufacturing and to
showcase the amazing products from all 50 states made in the U.S.A. Remember in the
old days you used to have "made in the U.S.A.," "made in America"?
But made in the U.S.A., we’re going to start doing that again.
We’re going to put that brand on our product, because it means it’s the best.
... We want to build, create and grow more products in our country, using American labor,
American goods and American grit.
When we purchase products made in the U.S.A., the profits stay here, the revenue stays here,
and the jobs, maybe most importantly of all, they stay right here in the U.S.A.
AMY GOODMAN: While President Trump is promoting "Made in America" week, we turn now to look
at a recent investigation by The Guardian that revealed workplace abuse, grueling production
targets and deplorably low pay at an Indonesian factory that makes clothing for the Ivanka
Trump brand label.
Many of the female workers at the factory in West Java say the pay is so low, they live
in constant debt and can’t afford to live with their own children.
This comes as three Chinese activists with the group China Labor Watch were imprisoned,
though now released, after they were arrested while investigating labor conditions at a
factory manufacturing Ivanka Trump brand shoes in China.
Well, last month, we spoke to the journalist who broke the story, Krithika Varagur, in
Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital.
She talked about what she discovered in her investigation.
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: I went to the factory in West Java, about three hours from Jakarta,
that makes clothes for G-III Apparel Group, which is this global conglomerate that makes
clothes for a bunch of high-profile brands, including Calvin Klein, Karl Lagerfeld and
Ivanka Trump.
What I found there was fairly typical of other Indonesian garment factories, which is to
say there were quite a few labor violations, according to the workers that I spoke with,
including consistent unpaid overtime or poorly compensated overtime, an extremely low minimum
wage—still legal, I want to emphasize that, but quite low for Indonesia and quite low
for Asia—and reports of verbal abuse from company management.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the people you met there, particularly the young women, and
what they had to say about their work conditions.
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: Yeah.
So this is a pretty large factory, almost 3,000 people, and the vast majority of people
who work there are women.
And often they are the breadwinners for their whole family.
The fact about this minimum wage and the reason this town has become quite attractive to garment
factories is that this minimum wage is incredibly low even for Indonesia.
It’s about $173 a month.
And this means that if you’re from out of town, which is to say, if your parents don’t
have a house here that you can stay in, you can’t afford—you basically can’t afford
to have your children live with you.
According to many labor activists, this is not a living wage.
One prominent activist that I quoted called it a "poverty wage."
And the working moms that I met, including the one that was prominently featured in my
piece, simply can’t afford to have their kids live with them.
They live in a different town with their grandparents and see their parents about once a month.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about this area being—where this factory is, being particularly low wages
even for Indonesia.
What?
Like you said, $160 a month, which would be what?
Forty dollars a week, which would be well under a dollar an hour, because also you describe
people saying they’re forced to work overtime and not be compensated.
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: Right.
This wage is quite low for Indonesia.
In a neighboring town, for example, Purwakarta in West Java, the minimum wage is over 3 million
rupiah, whereas here it’s only 2.3.
When I spoke to the manpower ministry of this district, they were quite insistent that this
wage was important to keep them competitive in the global garment market.
But, of course, when you look at it from the global perspective, this wage is about 40
percent lower than what the equivalent factory workers are making in China.
And it was reported earlier this month in The New York Times that the G-III Apparel
Group was looking to move to cheaper labor, even cheaper than China, and had been closing
down some of its factories.
So you see this downstream movement, chasing lower and lower wages, which I think this
is a part of.
AMY GOODMAN: And that issue of China is particularly relevant when it comes to Ivanka brand—Ivanka
Trump brand clothes.
We just reported on the three investigators for China Labor Watch who went to a factory
in China, which actually pays more than the factory you visited in Indonesia.
They were investigating the conditions there, and they’ve all been arrested, which is
unusual even for China right now.
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: Yeah, it’s certainly concerning.
And I believe that the Ivanka Trump brand has distanced itself from that particular
factory, because they don’t currently produce things there anymore.
I would say it’s a disturbing development.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk to us about Alia, the young woman you met in the West Java factory.
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: Yeah.
Without giving too much away, she’s been working all her life.
She’s a mother to two children.
And what I would emphasize is that she is not unique within the factory.
She said there’s dozens of moms just like her whose main interactions with their kids
are in photos on their phone that they store up when they visit them once a month.
And, you know, they’re doing honest work.
They’re getting a legal wage.
And this factory is not beyond the pale.
It’s a very, you know, ordinary Indonesian factory.
But the fact is, even working day after day, the money they make is simply not enough.
And there’s just a great, great distance from the lives these women live, these working
moms live, and the professional rhetoric of Ivanka Trump, who wrote a book on women in
the workplace.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, you actually share the sort of gist of the book, Ivanka Trump’s book,
Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, with this young woman, this factory worker
at the West Java factory.
What did she say about what Ivanka recommends when it comes to "rewriting the rules for
success"?
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: I mean, she thought it was funny.
She just started laughing.
This work-life balance rhetoric is totally alien to women of her class and in their position.
And they don’t balance their work and lives because they want to, but because they have
to.
And yeah, I mean, there’s just a huge gap between their lived experience and the rhetoric
that’s being pushed in Ivanka Trump’s book.
So, they thought it was pretty funny.
She and many of them did know who she was, but they weren’t familiar with the intricacies
of her brand and so forth.
AMY GOODMAN: So she can’t see her children but once a month, when she travels—makes
enough money for the gasoline to go hours away to her family, who—where her children
are being raised by their grandparents.
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: That’s correct.
AMY GOODMAN: You also talk about President Trump calling out Indonesia last March for
having an unfavorable trade balance with the United States, saying that Indonesia was treating
foreign—was cheating foreign importers.
Can you explain how that fits into this picture?
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: Sure.
Indonesia is one of the countries that Donald Trump singled out for having what he called
an unfair trade balance with the United States.
I believe as of last year it was a $13 billion surplus.
And he promised to correct that, as it were, and return jobs and the import-export balance
in America’s favor.
So it’s ironic in that context, that having singled out Indonesia as one of these countries,
his daughter’s clothing brand uses Indonesian labor.
AMY GOODMAN: And Donald Trump keeps on saying he will penalize companies that go to other
countries, talking about bringing jobs back to America.
Now, this company, Ivanka Trump’s brand, you don’t always know that it is the Ivanka
Trump brand, is that right?
The name is different, and they’ve even changed the Ivanka Trump brand name in some
cases.
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: That’s correct.
It’s been sort of plummeting in popularity in various metro areas in recent months, to
the point where G-III, which is the apparel group that owns Ivanka Trump, has been discreetly
relabeling her merchandise to a brand called Adrienne Vitadini, apparently without informing
Ivanka Trump’s brand, in hopes of moving it off the shelves.
I’m not sure what the effects of that have been, but I think it points to the fact that
her merchandise is kind of getting tougher to move off the shelves.
AMY GOODMAN: Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world.
Did you talk to the workers at this factory?
Were they aware of all the controversy around the Muslim ban one and two of the current
president, President Trump, the father of Ivanka Trump, whose clothes are named after
her, though she’s distanced herself while she is an adviser to her father in the White
House?
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: Yeah, certainly some of them were aware of Donald Trump, and for obvious
reasons.
Since almost every worker in this factory is a Muslim, they were not fans of him.
But this factory town, like many other factory towns in Indonesia, is a one-horse town.
You either keep this job, or you work on the farm.
So like one of the people quoted in my article said, they are not in a position to make employment
decisions based on their principles.
So, as much as they have personal problems with working—with indirectly supporting
a family that has announced a Muslim ban, they can’t do much about it right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you gotten a response from the Ivanka Trump brand?
The publisher of Ivanka Trump’s book, Adrian Zackheim, told ABC News in a statement, "The
book highlights the author’s continuing commitment to inspire and empower women to
define success on their own terms and to create the lives they want to live."
Have they responded directly to your piece and exposé about the conditions in this one
plant in Indonesia that makes Ivanka Trump brand clothes?
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: No, not yet.
AMY GOODMAN: Is there anything else you’d like to add about what you found and how people
in the plant feel?
This is a nonunion plant?
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: There are two small unions represented, but they are quite a small fraction
of the total factory population.
So they’re less than 10 percent of the factory.
AMY GOODMAN: And are many of the factories in Indonesia—are there a number that are
going to this Subang district of Indonesia, where the minimum wage, which, to say the
least, is extremely minimal, is even lower than other parts of Indonesia?
KRITHIKA VARAGUR: Yeah, there are quite a few Korean apparel groups in this region,
and there are, I think, over 300 companies in Subang as of this year.
It’s become quite—it’s becoming a semi-prominent industrial zone within the last two decades,
after spending a long time as an agrarian community.
And in terms of the factory as a whole, I would just say it is a very run-of-the-mill
Indonesian garment factory.
But, of course, the reason that it bears a second look is because of the connection to
a very specific brand that is built on women in the workplace.
So, I think it’s important to look at the supply chain of a brand that positions itself
in that way.
AMY GOODMAN: [Krithika Varagur, speaking to us from Jakarta], Indonesia, about her Guardian
investigation, "Revealed: reality of life working in an Ivanka Trump clothing factory."
We’ll link to that at democracynow.org.
All Ivanka Trump brand apparel are made abroad.
President Trump declared this week "Made in America" week.