Human Rights Education: The 4th R
Educating for Economic Justice,
Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 1998.

Wages, Earning Power, and Profit: International Lessons

Overview: These exercises help students make the connection between their own clothes and the earning power and wages of the laborers who make them.

In Part I students first examine the labels of their own clothes to determine where they are made and hypothesize about the conditions under which they were made.

In Part II by comparing Mexican earning power to their own earning power, students develop a sense of the drastically lower earning power in Latin America compared to the United States.

In Part III students then calculate how the price of clothes sold in the United States would be affected by raising the wages of Salvadoran maquiladora workers.

Setting: middle school through adult

These activities are adapted with permission from Child Labor is NOT Cheap, a curriculum for middle, high school and adult learners by Amy Sanders, published by the Resource Center of the Americas, Minneapolis, MN. Part III is based on an example taken from the video Zoned for Slavery: The Child Behind the Label. (See review for ordering information.)

Part I: Consider your Clothes

  1. Examine the labels on your clothes to see where they were made.
  2. Who do you think sewed your clothes? How much does an average shirt cost? How much does a pair of jeans cost? What do you think the person who sewed the garment should receive as compensation for his or her work? Half the retail price of the garment? One-quarter?
  3. Do you work? What is your hourly wage? The hourly wages of your classmates?

Part II: Work and Basic Necessities—Comparing Earning Power

A typical worker in Mexico earns about 26 pesos ($3.60) a day. This chart shows how many paid hours it takes to buy a few basic necessities. The figures reflect average prices in Tijuana, the city across the border from San Diego.

Activity: Go to a grocery store and check the prices of the same items. Then calculate how many hours of work, at “your” wage, it would take for you to buy them. You will need to convert pounds into kilograms (kg).  1 kg = 2.2 lbs.

Your wage: __________/ hr.

Necessity Typical Mexican Hours of Work Needed to Pay for Necessity U.S. Grocery Store Price Hours of Work at Your Wage
Beans, 1 kilogram 4 hours _________ _________
Rice, 1 kilogram 1 hour, 26 minutes _________ _________
Tomatoes, 1 kilogram 1 hour, 35 minutes _________ _________
Beef, 1 kilogram 8 hours _________ _________
Chicken, 1 kilogram 3 hours _________ _________
Egg, 1 dozen 2 hours, 24 minutes _________ _________
Milk, 1 gallon 4 hours, 17 minutes _________ _________
Toilet paper, 1 roll 43 minutes _________ _________
Diapers, a box of 30 11 hours, 30 minutes _________ _________
Shampoo, 10 ounces 2 hours, 25 minutes _________ _________
School uniform (mandatory)  57–86 hours _________ _________
One school book 17–20 hours _________ _________
Aspirin, a bottle of 20 2 hours, 25 minutes _________ _________

Part III: The Effects of Higher Wages

When we approach clothing retailers about requiring better wages for the workers who make our clothes, they often tell us that wages must be held low so that U.S. consumers can have inexpensive products. With some facts and some math we can evaluate the validity of this claim.

Let’s take, for example, a T-shirt that sells for $20.00 in the United States. This shirt is manufactured by an international corporation at one of its factories in El Salvador. This factory is one example of a maquiladora, which is a factory that assembles goods for export.

The Salvadoran workers producing the shirt were paid $0.56 an hour. On average, a worker is able to sew approximately 4.7 shirts per hour.

Using the information above, calculate the following:

How much does a worker receive per shirt?         ______________

In 1994, the Salvadoran government calculated that to support a family at a bare-subsistence level, it would take approximately four times the wages provided by maquiladora work.

If a worker’s wages were quadrupled, how much would he or she make per hour?    ______________

How much would be earned per shirt?    ______________

If the company passed on this increased cost to the consumer, how
much would a GAP shirt cost?    ______________

Now imagine that a worker’s wages were increased by ten times.

What would be the hourly rate?    ______________

How much would be earned per shirt?    ______________

If the company passed on this increased cost to the consumer, how
much would you pay for the GAP shirt?    ______________

Part III discussion questions:

  1. Would you be willing to pay more for a shirt if that meant that workers in another country were getting higher wages? Do you think most people in the United States would be willing to do so? Why or why not?
  2. Based on only the information in this exercise, are any human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights being violated? Cite specific articles.
  3. The clothing manufacturer sells its goods in the United States yet manufactures them in El Salvador. Why do you think this is the case?
  4. Who should be responsible for seeing that Salvadoran workers make wages sufficient to support themselves and their families?