Fruit of the Loom's seedy deal: Irish labor ripe for picking.

Crouched on the bayshore of northern Donegal, the entry to Buncrana is marked by a municipal welcome sign which boasts that this small Irish town is twinned with Campbellsville, Kentucky.

Along with small-town solidarity, what the two communities share is an intimate relationship with the garment-maker Fruit of the Loom. On St. Patrick's Day this year, a huge truck pulled out of the lowlying Buncrana plant and lumbered into town. Small girls in traditional dress danced gingerly on the flatbed. To their left, Irish flags fluttered green and gold; to the right, stars and stripes. Above the girls, their audience, and the waiting traffic, the bold apple-and-grape logo stood out, familiar to underwear-wearers around the world.

Fruit of the Loom set up shop in Buncrana five years before Western Europe opened up as a free-trade zone. The company bought a local outfit, enlarged the site, and opened a manufacturing plant to spin yarn imported from the United States into underwear and other clothing. A few years later, the company announced plans to pair its southern Irish operation with a couple of spinning plants in the British-controlled North. Now yarn for the manufacturing shop in Buncrana comes directly from Derry ("Londonderry" to the British) less than thirty miles away across the border.

"We have no doubt that as in Donegal, we will find people in Northern Ireland who are equally good at adapting to our production processes," declared William Farley, company chair in 1990. "I also have no doubt that our investment in Northern Ireland will achieve the same success as our plants in the Republic of Ireland."

He was not wrong. Since 1989, Fruit of the Loom's international sales of "active wear" have almost tripled, according to the company's 1993 year-end report. By acquiring local facilities and building new plants within the European trade zone, Fruit of the Loom reached 350 million potential buyers and got local taxpayers' money to do it. Because of the dismal employment situation in both places, the Irish Republic and the British government wooed Fruit of the Loom with grants for employee training and the acquisition of property and equipment.

"When it was announced that Fruit of the Loom were to open a factory, there was great rejoicing," says journalist and veteran organizer Eamonn McCann, over a pint glass filled with water in Derry's popular Dungloe pub. "Now that we have the factory open and it's in production, if you go and talk to the workers at Fruit of the Loom, you will find that many of them want out of the factory. They don't like working there because they're not treated with any dignity there. They're not treated with any dignity there because the Fruit of the Loom company was given to understand that if they came to Derry, so grateful would the people of this area be for their presence, that they could treat us any way at all."

Workers were too nervous about reprisals to permit themselves to be identified, but they say the situation in the Derry plants is dire. "Women are leaving every week," says one. "Just getting up and going." Approximately 2,000 workers, most of them female, are paid according to how much they produce. "You have to do 100 per cent of the quota before you get paid in full," one worker says. A similar situation exists in the Irish Republic. Some employees reported being kept after hours, unpaid, until they met their quota. Starting pay is eighty-nine pounds (about $148) a week, with percentage increases based on piece work. "It's a company union," a long-time employee shrugged. "Nothing's been done for us by them."

In fact, according to McCann, the Dublin-based union that represents Fruit of the Loom employees (SIPTU, the Service, Industrial, Professional, and Technical Union), signed a contract with Farley Industries before the plants in Derry were even built. The workers discovered that they were members when they saw a dues deduction taken from their wage.

"This is a top-down agreement of a classic and most vicious sort," says McCann, who claims the contract contains a nostrike clause. When asked about the deal, SIPTU officials in Derry recommended that reporters "talk to management."

The Northern Irish situation is peculiar because of the particular political problems the region faces, but in broad outline, it's familiar. Troubles or no troubles, Northern Ireland is increasingly being promoted as a place where international corporations can find cheap labor and a disciplined and docile work force.

"I think it's perfectly possible that we will have a political settlement here that will leave behind a great mass of economic and human-rights problems," says McCann. "Indeed, I think that's what political establishments all around are aiming at."

Richard Needham, Northern Irish Minister for the Economy, met Fruit of the Loom chairman William Farley on an airplane during a trip to the United States and talked the Chicago businessman into coming to war-wounded Northern Ireland. "It was his salesmanship that persuaded us," says Farley. That, and a handful of cash. As of December 31, 1993, Fruit of the Loom acknowledged receiving about $43.5 million in grants from the Republic and $42.1 million from the United Kingdom. In return, approximately 2,700 workers in Donegal and Derry got low-paying jobs, and British bureaucrats got a glimpse of what they're calling the "peace dividend"--the economic investment some believe will flow into the North once the political conflict there is calmed.

"Derry's a place where U.S. firms can have a foothold in Europe with certain advantages," explained John Keanie, Derry City town clerk and chief executive of the city council. He lists the selling points: a common language, the availability and price of land for development, and the low cost of labor. As municipal publicrelations man, Keanie seeks international investment, and Fruit of the Loom is a coup he calls "delightful." From his oakpaneled room surrounded by the stainedglass windows of Derry's historic City Hall, he gushes about the future.

"I know it sounds like a bit of jargon, but we love to talk here about the peace dividend, and I think the peace dividend for the people here in the North would be more and more jobs."

Keanie goes further: "We're not going to wait until peace happens; we're working on it now." What's great about Fruit of the Loom, he says, is that it straddles the North/South divide, helping Derry establish itself as a regional power.

"We're all in the European Union now," says Keanie. "While the border is a political reality, of course, economically it's just not a big feature anymore."

It's not quite what civil-rights activists in Derry had in mind when they marched on the same City Hall in 1968 and 1969. The injustices then were clear, says Eamonn McCann. Then, the problems had to do with a British-backed system that deprived most Catholics of good housing, jobs, and any say in local power. One of the big triggers was discrimination in hiring and the domination of trade unions by powerful, anti-Catholic conservative blocs.

Today, in terms of housing distribution and quality, Northern Ireland has seen vast improvements. Although neighborhoods are as segregated as ever, people on both sides of the political divide live in better housing stock than they did in 1968. For more than two decades, all voting-age citizens have had equal rights at the polls. Well-armed British troops and a battery of "emergency" legislation still make political involvement dangerous, but plenty of people here have been able to ascend to the middle class and flee violent neighborhoods.

If peace were to come tomorrow, says McCann, the injustices would be different. Discrimination in employment is still obvious. Catholic men are two-and-a-half times more likely to be unemployed than their Protestant counterparts. (The disparity for women is slightly less.) In 1991, half of all Catholic households had annual incomes of less than 6,000 pounds ($10,000), compared with 42 per cent of Protestant households.

The bigger picture is that Northern Irish households as a whole have lower average weekly incomes and endure greater poverty than any other part of the United Kingdom. This March, unemployment was estimated at 13.2 per cent of the population. According to government statistics, 76 per cent of nondependent individuals receive below the average regional income (compared with 59 per cent in England). Meanwhile, some people on both sides of the political divide have been making money. In 1993, a Rowntree Foundation report declared that more inequality now exists within respective communities, (Catholic, Protestant) than between them.

McCann, who is chairman of Derry's local trade-union council, hears about these inequalities every day. "They want peace, so everyone will say, 'Peace in Northern Ireland, the problem's over,'" he says. "The problem will not be over."

Since the prime ministers of Britain and Ireland signed an agreement in December 1993, the topic for discussion in Northern Ireland has been peace. Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams was permitted a one-night stand in New York in February, and the pundits couldn't resist comparing Adams to Yasir Arafat. If change could happen in Palestine, why not Northern Ireland?

"It depends whose peace. It's not our peace that's on the agenda," says Marie Mulholland, a feminist activist who works with women looking for employment in Derry City. Mulholland has helped women find work and training at Fruit of the Loom and some other resident companies such as DuPont, the chemical manufacturers, and Seagate, a Silicon Valley firm that recently set up shop nearby. Now Derry is Seagate's European headquarters for computer-chip research and development. The firm found the conditions here more attractive than at sixteen other sites in Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

"The peace we want is about enshrining fundamental basic principles and rights.... What we've got on the table is a situation where now the British and Irish governments combined are telling us what's best for us," says Mulholland.

A constitutional settlement is hardly around the corner. Protestant defenders of British rule have promised to fight to the death before they'll give in to any semblance of unification with the South. Derry City Councilor Gerry Campbell represents a Protestant constituency staunchly opposed to the current Irish-English negotiations.

"I don't think there would be a peace dividend, in fact probably the reverse," if the Downing Street Accord were implemented, he says. "There would be the potential for a massive Armageddon on the scale that we haven't seen the likes of in the past twenty-five years."

But on the industrial estates just outside Campbell's district, business in the North is looking more like business in the Irish Republic. The options for workers are the same: rotten jobs or no jobs. And religious discrimination is of little interest to far-off foreign employers except to the extent that a divided work force tends to enhance corporate profits.

On the bright side, at least workers in Ireland, North and south, have a tradition of trade-union organizing. As of 1993, the Irish plants are almost the only Fruit of the Loom operations covered by collective-bargaining agreements. SIPTU sent letters of encouragement to workers at Fruit of the Loom in Harlingen, Texas, this July. In Harlingen, near the border with Mexico, Fruit of the Loom has pulled out all stops to derail an organizing effort by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.

"In the past two weeks, they've broken every law," says Sam Luebke, a union organizer who had managed to sign up 80 per cent of the 15,000 workers he met with at the integrated cotton mill. In the run-up to an August vote on union membership, Fruit of the Loom representatives tried to discourage workers from signing up with the union. "They told people who were applying for green cards that the INS would come for them if they supported the union," says Luebke. They told others that they'd lose their food stamps if they joined. Like the Irish, the taxpayers of Harlingen paid dearly for Fruit of the Loom to come to their town. The city paid $7 million to build a water-purification plant for bleaching and dying yarn, though residents often complain about the quality of their tap water, which could be improved by just such a modern purification facility.

To fight the union, Fruit of the Loom sent out the message that the company could easily close, or relocate.

"Three months ago, supporting the union meant you cared about workers' rights. Now it's come to mean that you want to close the factory," says Luebke.

Irish critics of free trade face a similar problem. No one wants to seem to be against the "peace dividend."