Pentagon Sweatshops.

Last July, I went to Nicaragua and visited with a young woman named Cristina Sanchez. She lives in a crowded, rundown colonia called Tipitapa. Six miles outside Managua, Tipitapa is home to 100,000 generally destitute people densely packed into thirty-five square miles. The squalid landscape consists of house after house that has been patched up with packing materials taken from factories. Almost half of the workers in the Nicaraguan Free Trade Zone live here. Mostly young women, they work sixty-five hours a week for foreign-owned companies, and they earn' only thirty or forty cents an hour.

Sanchez worked for Chentex, a sweatshop owned by the Taiwanese company Nien Hsing, until she was fired for sympathizing with the union. The chief purchaser of Chentex clothing is none other than the Pentagon, according to Chentex documents obtained by Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which sells clothing at U.S. bases around the world, purchases up to 40 percent of the clothing produced in the sweatshop, the group says.

Sanchez was getting paid twenty cents for every pair of jeans she produced. Americans buy them at Kohl's and Wal-Mart for $25. Last May, the union representing Chentex workers asked the company for a raise of eight cents for each pair of jeans sewn. The company refused to negotiate. When the union announced a one-hour work stoppage, the company fired all eleven members of the union's executive board, erected barbed wire on top of the walls surrounding the factory compound, brought in armed guards, and promised to break the union. Within a month, more than 300 workers--including Sanchez--had lost their jobs, and the company had filed a criminal suit against the union leaders.

Sanchez, twenty-one, tells me her story as she stands in the doorway of her one-room shack, holding her three-year-old daughter, Maria. The ends of the little girl's hair are discolored, perhaps a sign of protein deficiency and malnutrition. Maria has seizures and suffers from diarrhea, an especially dangerous illness for an infant in a developing country.

Sanchez still works in the free trade zone. Every day, just before sunrise, she joins dozens of other young women as they pile into a bright yellow school bus with Kent (Ohio) City School District emblazoned on the side. The destination of this bus is not an Ohio high school, but sweatshops with tight security and surveillance cameras.

There is palpable fear on Sanchez's face as she tells me of life inside the Chentex factory gates--plant managers yelling and screaming, the beatings, and workers' constant worry about losing their jobs if they complained. Many of the workers took Sin Sueno, a kind of NoDoz with Vitamin B. If they refused to work overtime, they lost the pay they had earned that day.

"They yelled at us, kicked us, hit us in the face or buttocks, and pulled our ears," she says. "I'm telling you this because I lived it."

The Pentagon is making the American taxpayer an accomplice to a union-busting sweatshop. The American people don't support sweatshop labor. They don't want to deny workers in other countries the same basic rights we enjoy in our country. But they give their tacit consent if we don't fulfill our responsibility to inform every American of what our military is supporting in our name.

After I sent a letter to President Clinton signed by sixty-eight House members requesting an investigation of the labor dispute, U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky warned Nicaragua it stands to lose some trade benefits if it doesn't move to ensure that Chentex complies with local labor laws. However, Fred Bluhm, a spokesperson for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, said that Pentagon representatives traveled to Nicaragua to examine the Chentex operation and "found no problems."

I have joined with Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, Democrat of Georgia, a member of the Military Procurement Subcommittee, in requesting that the General Accounting Office investigate the Pentagon's role in this sweatshop. We will not sit quietly by as members of the Army and Air Force support sweatshops in Nicaragua. The Pentagon must use its weight to demand that the Chentex management resolve the labor dispute and respect workers' rights.

Ohio Democratic Congressman Sherrod Brown, the author of "Congress from the Inside" (Kent State, 1999), is the ranking Democrat on the Commerce Committee's Health and Environment Subcommittee and a member of the International Relations Committee.