The video of David Letterman bringing out items of Donald Trump’s men’s clothing line with labels showing them to be made in China, Bangladesh, Honduras and Vietnam has gone viral, energizing a lot of laughter.
But it’s not funny, and we who laugh are remiss by not exploring the hidden secret in the production of the Trump Men’s Apparel and the Ivanka Trump Collection.
According to the June 9 issue of The Nation, “China Labor Watch,” a workers’ rights group that has successfully tied U.S. corporations with exploitive working conditions in Chinese factories, cannot locate the Trump facilities because neither the Trump Organization nor the Ivanka Trump Collection will respond to inquiries seeking names of specific factories or manufacturers.
They have tried to discover these locations by searching employment records and other means, but the secret of these locations has been carefully insulated.
The Trump Organization, like many other owners of lines of apparel, uses third-party organizations to hide their names so that they are immune to questions about workers receiving below-poverty wages and working under exploitive, unsafe and sometimes abusive conditions — the “sweatshop” conditions prevalent in China and the other countries in which Trump apparel is produced.
This way they also shield themselves from liability if the workers in these factories are hurt or killed, as happened with the disastrous collapse of a factory in Bangladesh.
It is clear that the Trump Organization is hiding something, and we need to stop laughing and expose just what they are hiding.
If all of us — as individuals and as members of religious, social and political organizations who care about the human rights of people worldwide — unite in demanding that the Trump Organization release the locations of its overseas factories, we will enable human rights organizations to inspect these factories, expose any unsafe and unacceptable conditions and thus bring about the conditions that save lives and dignify workers.
Please contact the media to demand that they tear down the wall of secrecy that the Trump Organization and Donald Trump have made almost impenetrable against attempts to break through.
Cynthia Loring MacBain
Easthampton