Gap Inc. was founded in 1969 by Donald and Doris Fisher in San Francisco, California, with a single store and a handful of employees. Today, they’re one of the world's largest specialty retailers with three of the most recognized and respected brands in the apparel industry - Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy. Gap Inc. has more than 153,000 employees supporting over 4,200 stores in more than 3,100 locations in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Japan and Germany. Their 2004 Sales were well over $15 billion, bringing in a net income of $1.03 billion, a 115.7% income growth from previous year.
Gap Inc contracts factories in 64 Countries, allegedly also making clothes within the US . And by “Made in the USA,” they mean, “Made in the indigenous countries that, out of desperation, joined the United States in hopes of gaining more stable government regulations, yet remain excluded from basic employment rights and minimum wage laws.” The “guest workers” from countries like Saipan, who joined the United States in 1975 to be citizens of the “land of the free,“ commit themselves to conditions that are simply shameful to basic human rights. Once committed, workers who toil for 12 hours daily behind barbed-wire fences, eat infested food, sleep on cots in dormitories that they are forced to pay more "fees" for, and work "off the clock" hours that they aren't paid for, can’t escape from the madness, unless they can pay a mandatory $10 thousand dollar fee for this “privilege.” Despite over 1,000 citations over a mere 5 years in Saipan, GAP remains stern on their refusal to pay a settlement with exploited workers. One worker was quoted:
“Before 1997, we called for the strike because we were forced to work overtime with no opportunity to take a holiday, we wanted to go home for the holiday. But now we have so many holidays, and we have no money to go home. There is nothing in balance… I have no question why people commit suicide.”
Of course, not all of the factories that GAP contracts could possibly conduct themselves like that, right? They have model factories like the Shin Won factory in Guatemala, acclaimed by industry reps and retailers, as well as winning several exporting awards in recent years. From afar, Shin Won is just an average factory ...
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...other loan for $20 from a loan shark.”
To think that these are just individual problems or “special cases” is outright foolish. 24 of 27 factory workers in Lesotho said that they owed money to loan sharks. Even more shocking, many loan sharks are supervisors at the factories in which these people make a living. This means that the supervisors can deduct money from the checks of people who borrowed the money. What does this mean to the workers? Weeks of work without pay, and the need to, you guessed it, borrow more money.
How could so much corruption ensue in these factories when the Gap’s 90 inspectors are paid to keep tabs on violations of their Code of Conduct? One Lesotho worker had this to say:
“In our factory we have this policy that we have two separate time sheets, one for the buyer and for the owner. Whenever the buyer comes, they show that person a sheet which does not have our actual salary. The management does not show the buyer our original time sheet, the one which shows what we are actually paid. We have two time sheets, and we have to sign both sheets. If I don’t then I will get fired. I have no other option but to sign both sheets.”
ABSTRACT: Water samples from local ponds and lakes and snow runoff were collected and tested for coliform as well as Escherichia coli. Humans as well as animals come into contact with these areas, some are used for recreational activities such as swimming and some are a source of drinking water for both animals and humans The main goal of this experiment was to see which lakes, snow run off and ponds tested positive for coliform or Escherichia coli and to come up with some reasoning as to why. It was found that the more remote pond with less contact contained the most Escherichia coli. However, another lake that many swim in and use as their drinking water indeed tested positive for a small amount of Escherichia coli. The two samples from the snow showed negative results for both coliform and Escherichia coli and the two more public ponds that aren’t as commonly used as a source of human drinking water but animal drinking water tested in the higher range for coliforms but in the little to no Escherichia coli range. It was concluded that the remote pond should be avoided as it’s not a safe source of drinking water for humans or animals. Other than that, the the other ponds are likely to be safe from Escherichia coli, but coliforms are a risk factor.
In today’s world, increasing big companies open factories in developing countries but many people said it is unethical and the factories are sweatshops. Most of the sweatshops were opened in east Asia and third-world countries and regions. The companies open the sweatshops in order to get more benefits is a kind of very irresponsible behavior. For example, Apple's factories in China are not good and unethical. Audit finds
Look down at the clothes you're wearing right now, chances are almost every single thing you are currently wearing was made in a sweatshop. It is estimated that between 50-75% of all garments are made under sweatshop like conditions. Designers and companies get 2nd party contractors to hire people to work in these factories, this is a tool to make them not responsible for the horrendous conditions. They get away with it by saying they are providing jobs for people in 3rd world countries so its okay, but in reality they are making their lives even worse. These companies and designers only care about their bank accounts so if they can exploit poor, young people from poverty stricken countries they surely will, and they do. A sweatshop is a factory
Large corporations such as Nike, Gap, and Reebok and many others from the United States have moved their factories to undeveloped nations; barely pay their employees enough to live on. Countries such as China, Indonesia, and Haiti have readily abundant cheap labor. There should be labor laws or an obligation of respecting workers to provide decent working conditions, fair wages, and safety standards.
, the amount of suicides per year is very high and so far, the treatments for mental health don’t work on all patients. Finally, depression results in a decline of a person’s work ethic and ability to properly work, and it would be
Many Americans are seeking an ideal presidential candidate for our next election; furthermore, many college students seek a candidate that has their best interest in mind, leading many to focus on Bernie Sanders and his ideas for an affordable education system. In the article, The Myth of the Student Loan Crisis, Nicole Allan and Derek Thomas focus the article on the risky investments of college and questioning the rising debt levels as a national crisis. While Allan and Davis claim the risk of college and mention rising debt levels as a national crisis; however, Allan and Davis use charts to support their stance while avoiding the issues Americans need to focus on, such as the rising cost of college, “justifiable debt”, and the cost of those not contributing to society.
The belief that the archaic-like prisons known as sweatshops have been abolished, has been proven false. They do, in fact, exist in not only foreign countries but also in America. The abuse of human rights is demonstrated as more than half the 22, 000 garment contractors in the United States don't pay workers minimum wage, according to the Labor Department, and working conditions are deplorable...Americans were horrified to learn last August of 72 Thai laborers imprisoned in El Monte, Near Los Angeles, who were forced to work up to 22 hours a day, seven days a week at $1.60 an hour" (Yeh).
... health and safety standards…” (Background of Sweatshops). In hindsight, the US is no better in labor conditions than any other country.
“Sweatshops Are the Norm in the Global Apparel Industry. We’re Standing up to Change That.” International Labor Rights Forum. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Feb. 2014. .
When America's cotton is sent to China, it is made into T-shirts in the sweatshops of China by laborers working 12-hour days and being paid subsistence wages. When the finished T-shirts re-enter the U.S., they are protected by the government through subsidies, tariffs, taxes, and protectionist policies that ensure that these foreign products will not provide too much competition to American-made shirts. Government regulations control how many T-shirt can be imported from various countrie...
Linda Lim, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School, visited Vietnam and Indonesia in the summer of 2000 to obtain first-hand research on the impact of foreign-owned export factories (sweatshops) on the local economies. Lim found that in general, sweatshops pay above-average wages and conditions are no worse than the general alternatives: subsistence farming, domestic services, casual manual labor, prostitution, or unemployment. In the case of Vietnam in 1999, the minimum annual salary was 134 U.S. dollars while Nike workers in that country earned 670 U.S. dollars, the case is also the similar in Indonesia. Many times people in these countries are very surprised when they hear that American's boycott buying clothes that they make in the sweatshops. The simplest way to help many of these poor people that have to work in the sweatshops to support themselves and their families, would be to buy more products produced in the very sweatshops they detest.
Numerous studies have examined various meteorological variables and environmental conditions, and found some that are associated with higher or lower densities of E. coli and other bacteria in water. There are 10 major meteorological variables included for investigation in this study that provide a detailed description of the climate and lake conditions in which E. coli were sampled. These 10 variables are atmospheric pressure, air temperature, dew point, precipitation, relative humidity, solar radiation (insolation), water temperature, wave height, wind speed, and wind direction. From a meteorological standpoint, a number of these variables are closely related and influence each other.
Americans do not realize the amount of clothing we wear on a daily basis is actually made in Cambodia, such as Adidas and even the Gap. The women that work for these sweatshops in Cambodia sew for 50 cents an hour, which is what allows stores in America, such as H&M to sell inexpensive clothing (Winn, 2015). The conditions these Cambodian workers face are a noisy, loud, and extremely hot environment where people are known for having huge fainting attacks. When workers were on strike a year ago, authorities actually shot multiple people just because they were trying to raise their pay. There is plenty of evidence of abuse captured through many interviews of workers from different factories, and is not just a rarity these places see often or hear of. Factories hire children, fire pregnant women because they are slow and use the bathroom to much, scream at regular workers if they use the toilet more than two times a day, scam hard working employees with not paying them their money they worked for and more, and workers are sent home and replaced if 2,000 shirts are not stitched in one day. Expectations are unrealistic and not suitable for employees to be working each day for more than ten
Dokoupil, Tony. A. The "Suicide Epidemic" Newsweek Global 161.19 (2013): 1 Business Source Premier. EBSCO. Web.
Suicide has become a critical, national problem and the extent of this is mind-boggling. Suicides have been proven to be one of the leading causes of death among college students. According to Webters dictionary “suicide is the act killing oneself on purpose”. It derived from the Latin sui, meaning “self”, and caedere, which means “to kill”. But this is just a definition, because an actual suicide holds different meanings to people such as tragic, shocking, a relief, a cry for help, a shame, heroic, the right choice, punishment, revenge, protest, anger, a mistake, desperate, hurtful and many more. But why do people, like college students who have their entire future ahead of them, simply give up hope and turn their heads away from life and commit suicide. There are several causes of suicide, recent incidents of suicide on college campuses, warning signs from a suicidal. I blame the Constitution and the United States law for not taking any hard initiative on the subject of suicide. I also impose the choice of the media, which is reflecting and portraying suicide towards a wrong direction. However most important questions remain: can the growing epidemic of suicide be solved, what are communities doing about it and what can they do to help?