Home-grown Columbia Sportswear has the Sweatshop Market all Stitched Up

A little Company History

My involvement with Columbia Sportswear

My first day at the warehouse was for orientation. The warehouse turned out to be up on the Columbia River, across from Terminal 6 where pResident Bush recently gave a stump speech. Entering the front foyer/cafeteria section of the warehouse, one is confronted with numerous blown-up posters of advertising copy, pushing the masterful PR image of the company as the successful supplier of youthful, hip clothing. Adorned with pictures of forests and stark cliffs, many of the advertisements featuring the Chairwoman of the company depicted as the dignified-haughty, wry Mother Boyle ("Many would claim that Mrs. Boyle is cold. Frigid? Maybe. Cold? Never!"). The huge number of employees in the lounge looked experienced and comfortable with their employment, almost intimidatingly so. A quick tour of the grounds showed what looked like happy employees working industriously away, deftly aiming beams of laser light from their wrist-mounted computers at cardboard boxes of product, and moving them from place to place. Conveyor belts deftly shunted boxes this way and that, while in one section, modified forklifts carried their human operators up numerous rows of shelving as if they were bionic legs.

Other than concerns about cybernetization of workers, and the exposure to radio-frequency signals the body-ware used to communicate with the central computer, I there was little to set me off in the first few days. But after that, the veils of innocence and naivety wore off rather quickly.

Working for Columbia Sportswear in Portland

Getting Hired

Because the turnover rate was so high, perhaps 50% in a month, Columbia probably ends up hiring nearly a thousand temporary employees during each peak season. That would be a lot of recruitment and paperwork to do, not mention liability to cover, but Columbia handles none of it. They offer work contracts to a network of 9 or 10 temporary work agencies in Portland, each one of which handles the nitty-gritty details of getting fresh, legal, workers to the job site.

Even the person who handles the temp workers, an amiable guy named Annano, is on contract from the ESM Group Inc. From what I could tell, Annano took his reponsibility toward his bewildered charges seriously, but at any given moment, there were so many that he was definitely earning his keep if he even tried to keep up. One to three times a week, new name-badges would be lined up on the desk of the front-door receptionist. These represented groups of new hires which had just completed their orientation, watched the series of videos, covering topics from "How to lift safely" to "Dealing with infectious material". They were reporting for their first day of work, all set to assume their assigned work positions.

One day during the smaller 2nd lunch, a huge stream of unfamiliar faces poured into the lunchroom and flocked around Annano - a particularly large group of orientees wrapping up their session. A wave of uneasiness passed visibly through the rest of the room; the current employees almost outnumbered by the new hires, wondering when they would be replaced.

Getting Fired

Rumor had it that if you were fired, your badge would just be deactivated overnight, so that when you came in the next morning, the entry gate wouldn't let you through. Sounds humiliating, but I never did actually see it happen. My guess is that when people thought they might get fired, they just stopped coming to work, rather than face that heavily rumored prospect. Sometimes when people did disappear, rumors would start to go around about how so-and-so couldn't handle the strain of some ridiculously-easy-sounding task, like simply putting labels on boxes. I never did see any ridiculously easy tasks while I worked there, at least not ones filled by near-retirees, and I had a feeling that these rumors were spread by the management to confuse employees and foment discontent.

Life in a Modern Warehouse; or, What to Do in Between Hiring and Firing.

The work was often strenuous, and while many employees talked about how they liked getting paid time-and-a-half, at other times they would frequently complain that the required overtime didn't leave enough time in the week to rest and prepare for the next week of physical strain. Thus, there was a cumulative impact on the employees that probably caused many to quit, and increased the turnover rate.

Columbia didn't seem to have any problem with always taking on new employees. One can guess that they probably saw some advantage to it. New workers were often more energetic and anxious to get overtime hours. They also hadn't received any small raises and were probably on a less expensive contract with the temp agencies. The energy usually didn't last long, and these employees tended to become worn out and cynical rather quickly. Some people never did seem to get down about their job, and maybe Columbia saw the turnover rate as a way to "cull the herd" and find more of the work-horse troopers. Or maybe those people were just more desperate than most. However, I also felt that people were leaving due to serious strain and back injuries.

While the temp agencies were required to purchase Worker's Compensation Insurance for their employees, I couldn't help but feel concern for some of the fresh-out-of-high-school workers for whom a five-minute safety video could hardly convey the infinite agony of a crippling back injury brought about by cumulative strain and damage. Worker's Comp doesn't last that long, and depends on the doctors actually giving you a correct diagnosis when you present with back pain, instead of putting you off with a "take these painkillers and it'll go away on its own" sham prognosis. In our orientation, it was promised that none of the boxes weighed over 45 pounds, but several people swore to me that they were dealing with much heavier loads. In most cases, however, people were stubborn and proud, and bore their burdens silently.

And quickly. Because most employees were directed by a wireless-networked computer worn on their arm, each move they made could be tracked by computer logs, which they used for calculations in the PRIDE program. Columbia was anxious to enhance productivity, especially because they were setting shipping records every month this summer, and the PRIDE program offered bonuses to employees for high levels of "efficiency". The misnomer "efficiency" was used to describe the composite score generated from the computer logs for each employee, with "100% efficiency" being the standard for the amount of work an employee was expected to be able to do in a day. Such a score might yield a 5% pay bonus, with up to 20% bonuses being possible. We were assured that the working standards were "scientifically derived from expensive research", although workers doing quite different tasks had the exact same standards, which casts some doubt on these claims.

However, for all the data available to the managers, the analysis wasn't very sophisticated, showing just cumulative totals of each type of work completed during the day. For various reasons, it could sometimes be quite difficult to meet the standards, or for those armed with "tips & tricks", it could be quite easy to exceed them by outwitting the system. Also, anytime an employee's efficiency dropped, from 125% to 115%, say, seemed to be a good time for any or all of a host of supervisors and managers to chide or chastise the employee for their "lost productivity". When the conveyor belts broke, or there otherwise weren't any tasks related to moving goods around, there was always busy work needing to be done, in order to keep the efficiency scores high. All-in-all, Columbia maintained the appearance of "speeding up the [assembly] line" as they used to say. An employee failing to meet the 100% standard could expect to be fired soon.

One of the few good things I could detect about the work site was the diversity of its employees. While employees were often relegated to different tasks based on their gender or build, there seemed to be a good balance between men and women in the warehouse. Ethnic and cultural background seemed to be spread liberally around the map, at least among the temporary and low-ranking employees. Education level and economic class seemed to range from middle to low, possibly reflecting the dubious allure of a minimum-wage temporary position.

One of the things I expected to find at Columbia was a commitment to environmental sustainability. In this I was sadly disappointed. Virgin paper printouts were prolific, and used on one side only. While consumer-bound individual boxes appeared to be marked with a recycled content marking (although in retrospect perhaps it was merely a "recyclable" label), I saw no multi-item shipping boxes with a recycling certification. Some boxes came from diverse parts of the world, others were Willamette Industries (aka Weyerhauser), possibly virgin Old Growth from the start. At least they put these boxes into recycling bins when their short lifespans were over, but I think there is a law about that. At least maybe they can be used to make recycled boxes for some other, environmentally conscious company.

Where does Columbia get its Social Consciousness from?

Sweatshops are factories that pay their employees under the living wage, force their employees to work overtime without being paid for it, lock employees in during the shift, keep workers from going to the bathroom, physically or mentally threaten their workers, keep their employees as prisoners, and/or keep a strong union from forming against the will of the employees.

In as much as I could tell, Columbia uses a production model pioneered by Nike where independent manufacturers across the globe are asked to submit bids on the designs Columbia wants manufactured. While the company's "Standards of Manufacturing Practices" refers to specific guidelines which address many of the sweatshop definitions above, many of the provisions are made relative to "local law".

While the threat of public pressure forced Columbia out of the military dictatorship-controlled manufacturing industry in Burma in 1994, there are still a good many other garment-manufacturing centers that fail to demonstrate healthy democracies or independence from the US military-corporate-political complex. The roster of originating countries I saw while I worked there included: Taiwan, Indonesia, Phillipines, Thailand, India, El Salvador (featured in The Corporation), Nicaragua, Jordan, the Dominican Republic, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka. Three more don't really surprise me, but are shocking nonetheless: China (a substantial portion of product originated there), Vietnam and Cambodia. With regards to the last, I found an article extolling Cambodia as making great strides to humanize its garment industry, and bill itself as a socially-conscious supplier, but apparently the change is far from complete, and the industry is likely to collapse when special trade relationships expire at the end of this year. Toward the very end of my time at Columbia, I began to see "Made in the USA" stamped on boxes. I don't know how to take this development; is Columbia really contracting with American garment factories, or did they come from some high-tech fully-automatic factory on American soil with little to no workforce?

The Future of Columbia Sportswear

During the course of my employment there, the exciting word going around was the status of a second North American Distribution Center being constructed out of 500,000 square feet in Kentucky, which will take over all distribution aspects of the growing shoe sub-market. With their Distribution Center in France serving all of Europe, Columbia Sportswear is truly a company on the move, with a fat bottom line that can only be growing.

Two recent news items are likely to impact local operations here in Portland. First, the Bonneville Power Administration announcement that it plans to reduce wholesale energy rates, starting with its corporate customers, should cut operating expenses associated with running so many conveyor belts and fluorescent lights. The second bit of news isn't so rosy, however. Two of the three cargo shipping companies servicing the Port of Portland (Hyundai and K-Line) have recently announced that they will be cutting Portland out of their circuits. The eminent loss of 50% of the Port of Portland's shipping capacity will probably cost Columbia Sportswear, in terms of increasing shipping rates at Terminal 6, more frequent delays, and the higher cost of alternately trucking shipping containers from the Port in Seattle. Most likely, some Columbia execs were supportive of Bush's recent visit to Portland, because the theme of his speech at Terminal 6 was the need to dredge/deepen the Columbia River channel to accommodate larger cargo ships, making Portland a more attractive port for shipping lines. Others say that the Port of Portland began to do itself in when it allowed the Western Hemisphere's largest floating dry dock to be sold out from beneath their noses. In any case, this article mentions that Tim Boyle, President and CEO of Columbia, gave $2000 to the Bush re-election effort.

I don't see Columbia's labor practices changing for the better any time soon. As long as the economy is in a slump and there are legions of the desperately-unemployed willing to break their backs for Columbia's meager compensation, I imagine they will continue to use up and throw away as many temp workers as they please. Despite all assurances to the contrary, conditions in Columbia's contract factories are probably much worse, and not getting better, with an appreciable side of effect of the "War on Terror" being the stifling of dissent in many of the dictator-controlled countries where cheap garments are made.

I wrote this article for Portland Indymedia in the hopes that some locals might see it, and inform themselves about the working conditions they can expect in Columbia's warehouse. Maybe some of those will refuse to become grist for the mill, or at least apply their time there to accomplishing some greater change within the company.

Certainly, it's a little more realistic to put pressure on Columbia by refusing to work there, than it would be to try labor organizing with temp workers who only hang around for a month or two anyway. Besides, I'm told the only way to formally organize the workers at Columbia would be to organize each of the temporary agencies that feed workers to Columbia first. Then once all the agencies were unionized, they could simultaneously demand a contract negotiation. But organizing all the workers of even one temp agency sounds like a long shot to me.

Finally, it's also my hope that this article might stimulate some consumer interest in the manufacturing practices at Columbia. If consumer response toward Columbia's business model and manufacturing practices were to become extremely negative, it could do more to impact the use of exploitative labor in the third world than anything local workers could achieve.

I'll leave this article archived here mainly so that something will come up on Google should other people search for "Columbia Sportswear" and Sweatshops. But I might also end up disseminating versions of this article in other locales or media if it seems appropriate. Thank you for reading this long article, and thank Indymedia and the benevolence of Open Publishing for giving me somewhere to put it. I offer myself as an available repository of information, if anyone wants to contact me, at betteranbetter@yahoo.com