Flory Alvero

“Factory outlets” selling shoes and clothing made many thousands of miles away are virtually all that’s left of Maine’s once proud apparel industry. In recent decades, most of the last remaining shoe and garment factories closed their doors, as companies outsourced their manufacturing to sweatshops in places like El Salvador and China and Indonesia where workers are paid less for a day’s work than Maine’s hourly minimum wage.

In 1996, workers, community activists, and small business owners responded to this disturbing trend by coming together to form the Bangor Clean Clothes Campaign, the first U.S. community-based grassroots campaign against sweatshops in the apparel industry. The campaign succeeded in convincing the City Council to pass a Clean Clothes Resolution, urging local merchants to ensure that the garments they sell are made under fair conditions, and an Ethical Purchasing Resolution setting clear ethical guidelines for the city’s purchase of garments ranging from t-shirts to fire and police uniforms.

Building on this success, PICA launched a state-wide campaign which won the passage of the nation’s first anti-sweatshop purchasing law in 2002, which helped to level the playing field for ethical businesses by requiring companies supplying footwear, apparel, and textiles to Maine’s state government to meet basic health, safety, and human rights standards. In 2006 we led a coalition of unions, business leaders, and community groups that worked with the state’s Division of Purchases to convince the legislature to strengthen the law by empowering workers and human rights activists to file complaints about workers’ rights violations at factories making footwear, apparel, and textiles for the state of Maine, and giving the state the ability to require companies to cooperate with independent monitors investigating complaints. The new legislation also created a working group to study how Maine might pool its resources with other states to better enforce sweatfree purchasing policies.