The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“VARIOUS ITEMS OF INTEREST TO TODAY'S YOUTH” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E1559-E1560 on Aug. 5, 1998.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
VARIOUS ITEMS OF INTEREST TO TODAY'S YOUTH
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HON. BERNARD SANDERS
of vermont
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, August 5, 1998
Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to have printed in the Record statements by high school students from my home state of Vermont, who were speaking at my recent town meeting on issues facing young people today.
Statement by Karl Cloney, Jessica Martin and Jonah Monfette regarding
Healthy Alternatives
KARL CLONEY: Karl Cloney, from North County Union High School. Our topic is healthy alternatives.
The Newport area recently has suffered the loss of four teenagers killed in a drunk driving accident on the way back from partying in Canada. Recently, there was a town forum held to respond to this tragedy. The community came together to discuss the issues and some ways to create healthy alternatives.
JESSICA MARTIN: Our group came together to propose a project to start an area teen center. The center will be a safe place for teenagers to socialize in a healthy manner. We further propose that we buy a space as a long-term investment in area youth and the community as a whole. We are looking at a size that would be large enough for a cafe for snacks to be served, a dance floor, and a space for a pool and ping-pong tables, some arcade games and video games. We also want an outside area for volleyball, skate-boarding, and roller blading. We would solicit funds as well as acquire grants and utilize state and federal funds set aside for alcohol-free events and activities and teenagers. We would like AmericaCorps and Vista personnel to staff the center full time. This would make our personnel more cost-effective and would include local, state and federal resources.
We would create a board of directors made up of parents, teens, business people and community leaders to oversee the center. Students would work in the center. This would give the teens responsibility, job skills, and the ability to work with adults to create their own place. The center would be a healthy alternative to hanging out on the streets to see our friends.
Our yellow ribbons symbolize the death of our young people, and also symbolize our hope and commitment to find healthy alternatives within our own community.
JONAH MONFETTE: The teen center could be put where the Department of Employment and Training is now. It is moving to the new building being built in Newport. It is an industrial building with space outside, and we want to buy the space so that it would be permanent.
Newport has high unemployment. The teen center would provide job skills for students helping with full-time staff.
The COURT: Thank you very, very much.
Statement By Brian Hodgson and Jessica Riley Regarding Child Labor
BRIAN HODGSON: In our world today, there are 250 million people toiling in sweatshops around the globe, 250,000 working right here in the United States. These workers endure long hours in filthy, unsafe factories and plants for subsistence wages paying them barely enough to keep them alive.
A typical sweatshop contains unsafe numbers of people packed into poorly lit, dusty, disease-ridden workplaces, with no sufficient ventilation or running water. Supervisors yell, scream, threaten and curse at the workers and put constant pressure on them to work faster. For all their suffering, workers are rewarded with paychecks reflecting hourly wages of 20, 37, as low as six cents, often with unexplained fees and tolls removed from the take-home amount.
Any workers who dare to speak up, to complain about their working conditions or pay, are fired. If the workers try to defend themselves, to meet, to learn their rights, or organize a union, their employment is almost always illegally terminated. The most fundamental human and employment rights of these workers are being violated on a daily basis.
One million of these workers are children, sold or rented out by their parents, in countries such as India or Pakistan, into a life of hard, bonded labor at the hands of clothing and rug producers. Children who should be in school are working long hours in unsafe, abusive conditions. To these children, education is a fantastic privilege, and life a daily struggle.
The move to Third World countries, where the minimum wages are steadily dropping and where environmental and worker regulations are nonexistent, has become an all too common trend in big business. Some of the most heinous abusers of this form of labor produce staples in our everyday lives.
At a Disney sweatshop in Haiti, a worker who handles 375 Pocahontas shirts an hour is paid the minimum wage of 28 cents an hour, or $10.77 a week, while the Disney shirts sell at Wal-Mart for $10.97 each. A pair of Nike sneakers that sell in the U.S. for $140 cost the corporation $3.50 in offshore labor expenses. That is about a 97 percent profit.
These exploitative companies could easily afford to pay their workers a living wage, but greedily choose not to.
JESSICA RILEY: At the Student Progressive Coalition in Brattleboro Union High School in Brattleboro, Vermont, we have taken positive action against these practices. Devoting our time to these issues, we have gathered hundreds of signatures on a petition to the National Labor Committee calling for President Clinton to end sweatshop practices. We took part in the promotion of and attendance at the National Day of Conscience that took place here, in Burlington, on October 4th. We have educated our community through a candle-lit vigil, as well as taken our knowledge into an elementary school to inform students there. Our letters have also stimulated the local paper to editorialize on the issue. It is almost impossible to walk down the halls of the community center without viewing an informative poster or hearing an issue being discussed amongst the crowds.
By making the community more aware of this one virtually unknown issue, we help to create a more conscientious consumer. But awareness is only one part of the action needed. We also need the power of your law to help with the issue.
Mr. Congressman, the approval of your bonded labor bill is a huge and welcome step in the fight to keep foreign items made by use of child labor being kept out of the country. He must not let the issue die with that. We need the U.S. to put money into the United Nations for inspections of shops around the world, as well as more money into the U.S. Department of Labor to increase inspections and sanctions right here at home. We also need laws that include prevention of any sweatshop products from being imported into the country.
BRIAN HODGSON: Although none of us on this earth actively choose to support these institutions by buying products without thinking of the effects, we do support them. If we keep buying these tainted goods, if a company involved with sweatshop labor continues to make a profit, then they will not give a thought to what they are doing, and these violations of justice will go on. We must take the time to research safe labor organizations. We must take the time to look at clothing labels. We must make sacrifices in order that these violations do not continue. By being educated, we can help workers in other countries and in our own get the rights they need and deserve.
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Statement by Neale Gay and Liz Rocheleau Regarding Education and Wages
NEALE GAY: My name is Neal Gay and this is Liz Rocheleau.
Let us start by thank you for your time. We will be discussing what we consider to be a wage problem plaguing the United States. In this land of opportunity, dreams cannot be realized as socioeconomic, classes are divided into two groups, the haves and the have-nots. We do not need a faction that is able to control the wealth and prosperity of an entire nation due to their personal and immense wealth. We readily admit that those with higher education may be better suited for management jobs; chances are they worked hard to attain dreams, like becoming CEO of a billion dollar company. But those that work under them are not given an opportunity to earn much more than a living wage.
LIZ ROCHELEAU: Since 1979, blue collar workers earning a wage at or after the 20th percentile have seen their wages drop an astonishing 11.8 percent. These wages are still going down, and even though minimum wage has increased numerous times in recent history, inflation makes this increase not at all worthwhile. Even more interesting, though, those earning a wage in the top ten percentile are the only ones who have seen an increase at all. We see this as a case of the rich getting richer, and the middle class and the poor quickly descending the economic scale.
NEALE GAY: Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, ``Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeois today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay, and finally disappear in the race of modern industry. The proletariat is its special and essential product.'' If we take this as true, that the worker has more worth than the industrialist due to their work, then shouldn't the worker get a reasonable compensation for his output?
LIZ ROCHELEAU: We are not talking about a revolution. We understand that the Federal Government can't put a cap on what people earn, since capitalism grants private industry. What we want to know from you is: What has the government done to make wage distribution just, and what are their plans for the future?
Congressman SANDERS: All right. Very interesting.
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