Jennifer Love’s Sweatshops

By Kelsey | July 6th, 2008 | No Comments

United Students Against Sweatshop takes Jennifer Love Hewitt to task. Here’s an excerpt from the story on ABC News:

“We respect your accomplished career as an actor,” USAS says to Hewitt in an open letter posted on the site’s home page. “As a spokesperson for Hanes, however, you are selling products made in unsafe factories overseas where women are abused.” The group calls on Hewitt to “stop selling Hanes sweatshop underwear.”

Here’s the Jennifer Love’s Sweatshops website USAS built. The website which pictures the People magazine of a not-so skinny Hewitt demanding “Stop calling me fat!” is set next to a magazine titled Worker with a garment worker demanding, “Stop starving me!”

The picture comes with this Note:

This quote is not attributable to an actual Hanes sweatshop worker and the photo shown is not of a Hanes sweatshop worker; neither the quote nor the photograph should be taken literally. Rather, they are presented as art to draw attention to the abusive conditions that workers making Hanes garments are enduring. Substantial information is available on this website and on the internet demontrating that some Hanes workers are subjected to violations of basic worker and human rights. For more information click here.

I feel sorry for both Hewitt and the workers in the Dominican Republic that, according to the website, are subjected to “verbal harassment, forced and under-compensated overtime, failure to pay night employees correctly for severance and vacation, the coercion of workers’ to sign statements giving up the right to complain about the company’s scheduling practices, and egregious violations of workers’ rights to unionize.”

(In the interest of full disclosure, I’m wearing a pair of Comfort Soft Waistband Hanes boxers, right now. They are the most comfortable underwear I’ve ever worn, although, devoid of cartoons, they lack a little in the humor department.)