Activism

Closing the Gap

by Kristen Lombardi

It's official: Gap, Inc., the maker of those perennially hip, classless yet oh-so-classy casuals, has evolved into an all-purpose corporate villain.

Activists have designated this Sunday, June 4, as a national Gap action day. Protests will take place outside stores in New Haven, New York, Baltimore, Cambridge, and Washington, DC. Local organizers say they hope to attract as many as 200 activists outside the popular chain's Harvard Square location to decry the Gap's ugly use of sweatshop labor and its even uglier destruction of old-growth forests in California.

"Pretty much every progressive group in Boston will be there," says Dan Denvir, an organizer with demonstration sponsor Campus Action Network, which has chapters at MIT, Harvard, and Tufts. Highlights will include a 25-strong drum brigade, pickets, and a mock fashion show spotlighting, as Denvir puts it, the "slave conditions that go into making these clothes."

It's no secret that the Gap has used sweatshop factories. The corporation, which consists of the Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic, was one of 18 brand-name clothiers sued last year for their woeful plants on the island of Saipan, a United States territory in the western Pacific. In the lawsuit, the San Francisco-based advocacy group Global Exchange charged leading labels with illegal labor practices and human-rights violations (see "Target: Target," News and Features, July 22, 1999). The case paints a grim picture of what amounts to indentured servitude for Saipan's garment workers, the majority of whom are young women from the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Thailand. Lured by the prospect of coming to the US, it's alleged, these workers end up being subjected to hazardous conditions: blocked exits, exposed electrical wiring, and shanty-like housing barracks. Unlike eight fellow defendants, including Calvin Klein, Inc., and Tommy Hilfiger USA, the Gap has refused to settle the suit -- which has only agitated its critics even more.

But the protesters have another complaint as well. "On top of all this," Denvir says with increasing frustration, "the Gap has a horrible environmental record."

In 1998, the Gap's founding dynasty, the Fisher family, bought a large chunk of old-growth redwood forest -- 235,000 acres, to be exact -- in Mendocino County, just north of San Francisco. Though the family's logging company purchased the area under the pretense of "being ecologically sound," Denvir says, it's been used for what the family calls "sustainable" logging -- in reality, clear-cutting. Activists have been especially outraged by the Fishers' refusal to set aside any acreage for conservation.

Even as the anti-Gap momentum continues to build, however, the store's loyal connoisseurs have been slow to shed their Gap cotton T-shirts and stone-washed jeans.

As Denvir explains, "People get defensive about their clothes, saying things like, 'I don't care, my clothes are comfortable.' "

Denvir, though, says that he'd rather wear nothing than wear Gap clothes. "All we're asking is for people to look at what goes into making all the things we feel we must have," he says.