December 11, 2000

Honorable Senators and Representatives,

My name is Cynthia Phinney. I live in New Sharon and I am here today to testify on behalf of a bill that would commit the state of Maine to avoid sweatshops when purchasing goods.

From 1979 to 1990 I worked as a handsewer for L.L. Bean, making shoes. Handsewers do the handsome stitching around the toes on shoes like penny loafers and moccasins. I considered it a good job, and most of my co-workers had been making their living at this trade for various companies in the state of Maine for their entire working lives. Handsewers at the time earned between $7 and $12 per hour plus benefits, working piece-rate, with most of us probably in the $8-9 range, or around $17,00 -18,000 per year. We were the best paid workers on the production floor, and our work - including benefits - probably accounted for $4-6 dollars of a pair of shoes which would sell for $60-100.00 in the LL Bean catalog.

Sometime around 1988, L.L. Bean began "Offshore Sourcing" some of our work to Korea. Hides were flown from the United States to factories overseas, where most of the work was done. The shoes were then shipped to our factory in Maine where the soles were put on them and they were sent to the L.L. Bean warehouse to be sold. After a relatively short time of doing this, the work was moved from Korea to the Dominican Republic. At that time, there was a man who worked in the office at the factory who periodically visited the "offshore" factories where the work was being done. He told us that handsewers there worked so tightly packed in that their hands nearly touched each other as they stitched. He told one of my co-workers that he often had to take a day or two off when he returned from these trips because the conditions he saw sickened him.

Once the offshore program was firmly established, L. L. Bean began to lay off the handsewers. Our department shrunk from fifty-five workers to about ten by the time I left. I believe they have less than five now.

My next job was at Downeast Shoe in Livermore Falls, where we sewed shoes for Cole Haan. At Downeast, we were paid less for our work, our benefit package was significantly leaner, but the shoes we made were sold for three to four times the price of Bean's shoes at the Cole Haan factory outlet in Freeport. I have no idea what they sold for at full price. At Downeast, every single one of my co-workers had been recently laid off from some other shoe factory in the area as the work had been either "Offshore sourced" or the plant had closed completely. My co-workers had come from Bass in Wilton, J.L. Coombs in Skowhegan, and more places I wasn't familiar with. This was right after Bass Shoe began moving its labor to countries where - according to the newspaper reports - they could get people to work for sixty cents an hour.

Within a year of when I started at Downeast, they too began laying off. That plant is now closed and the building is for sale.

Some of my friends from Downeast went to work at Franklin Shoe in Farmington - a factory which had been part of Farmington's economic life for many years. Just this past year, Franklin shoe closed this factory as it has now moved all its production to China.

We hear a lot these days about "the market driven economy". There is more to the "market" than price. As a consumer I try as much as possible to purchase goods from companies where workers get a reasonable deal - where they receive a decent share of the profits they work to create, where labor laws are adequate and adequately enforced to offer them important protections on the job. I - and I'm sure you as well - would never own slaves. I think it is imperative that we also refuse to purchase goods which were manufactured under slave-like conditions, merely because those conditions are invisible to us by virtue of not being right in our backyard. (there are, by the way, plenty of sweatshops in the United States, but they also are not immediately in most our views). I do not want my tax dollars supporting the downward spiral for workers which I described above. And because of all the pressures to reduce costs - dollar costs that is - I believe this legislation is necessary to give state purchasers the ability to do the right thing and be part of the market that supports decent jobs and working conditions in the twenty-first century.

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Cynthia Phinney
IBEW Local 1837
16 Old Winthrop Rd Suite 1
Manchester, ME 04351
(207) 623-1030
organize@mint.net
IBEW Local 1837

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