A small news item in the Mumbai Mirror in late October caught my attention. A zipper sweatshop in the city of Ghatkopar was the home of several young boys who were routinely beaten and tortured by the owner. The story quoted an 11-year-old rescued from the sweatshop. Speaking about owner Rajdeep Chaudhary, the boy said:

He used to hit the other two boys with a thick stick. Just like me he did not take them to a doctor even when they were bleeding badly. Finally one day last month, the two boys somehow managed to escape from the factory. Chaudhary did not even bother to look for them, but he started locking me up during the nights after that.

The boys in this sweatshop worked 16-hour days, were rarely fed and even starved, and lived in horrible conditions all too common in the global apparel industry. Such conditions are, if anything, encouraged in the industry by the multinational corporations who have long looked to avoid responsibility for their actions by outsourcing and subcontracting work to ever poorer nations.

Without a system of global accountability for American corporations contracting in other nations, such horrors will continue to occur.

We as labor activists must begin to think about how to build international labor solidarity by fighting for legislation that would create this accountability—specifically giving workers around the world the right to sue in American courts if companies or their subcontractors violated basic labor rights such as workplace violence, avoiding paying a nation’s minimum wage, or pollution discharges that sicken and kill people.