Walmart and Human Rights

"Going into these factories is like entering prison, where you leave your life outside. The factory owners do not let--and don't want--the young workers to think for themselves. They want them to be stupid. The workers need permission to use the bathroom, and they are told when they can and cannot go.

"Young women enter these factories at 14, 15, 16 and 17 years old. They become a mechanism of production, working 9 hours a day plus two, three or four hours overtime, performing the exact same piece operation over and over, day after day. A woman in the pressing department is required to iron 1,200 shirts a day, standing on her feet, her hands and fingers swell up from the hot iron. These young workers rarely last more than six years in the maquila, when they leave exhausted. They leave without having learned any useful skills or developed intellectually. These young workers entered the maquila with a sixth grade education, with no understanding of the maquila, the companies whose clothing they sew or the forces shaping where they fit into the global economy. They soon feel impotent, seeing that the Ministry of Labor does nothing, or almost nothing, to help defend their rights.

Once the women start working in the maquila they often fall into debt. The wages are very low and no one can survive on them."

--A Jesuit Priest in Honduras

Walmart dropped from Domini Social Investors list
on February 1, 2001, Wal-Mart was dropped from the Index and from the Domini Social Equity Fund's portfolio due to Wal-Mart's failure to implement an independent monitoring program of its overseas contract facilities, and various inadequacies in its code of conduct for overseas suppliers.

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