Levi’s Is Uncharitable Toward Its Workers

To the Editor:

In the article “Philanthropy Is in the Family Genes,” heirs to the Levi Strauss fortune describe how charity begins at home through donations to local groups. But Levi Strauss & Company should also start showing responsibility to the garment workers whose labor made the Haases one of the wealthiest families in the world.

This company mistreats its workers, and we have the scars to prove it. We are a group of garment workers who lost our jobs when Levi’s closed the plant where we worked in San Antonio, and laid off 1,150 workers, the majority of whom are Mexican-American women. Levi’s took our jobs to Costa Rica, where woman workers make in a day what we had been making in half an hour. Suddenly Levi’s destroyed our lives and left many of us with crippling injuries.

We formed an organization called Fuerza Unida (United Force) and organized an eight-year battle for justice from the company. We soon learned that we were not the only workers to suffer. During the 1980s, Levi’s closed 58 plants, putting 10,400 people out of work and moving about half of its production overseas. In November 1997, Levi’s laid off 6,400 workers, representing one-third of its total manufacturing work force in the United States and Canada.

Then, despite [chief executive officer] Robert Haas’s claim that “this is not a job-flight story,” in April 1998 Levi’s announced plans to return to China “because the human-rights situation has improved.” An international hearing organized by human-rights activists in Brussels in May uncovered brutal violations of workers’ human rights in Levi’s contracted shops in Indonesia, the Philippines, Mauritius, Bangladesh, and elsewhere.

We, too, believe that charity begins at home. We want Levi’s to sit down with us and reach a just settlement. We want Levi’s to respect the human rights of all of the workers around the world whose sweat and labor created the company’s huge profits and heirs’ fantastic wealth.

Viola Cacares and Petra Mata
Fuerza Unida Co-Coordinators
San Antonio