Brian Joseph, who works for the Center for Community and Corporate Ethics, sent this story to me. He states that Kevin Bacon’s publicist is upset that activists are targeting a fellow “liberal”. Yeah, attacking a liberal Hollywood-type is almost as crazy as attacking a “liberal” like Hillary Clinton! That fashionable title of being a “liberal” doesn’t buy you a free pass to profit off the misery of others. Capitalism and liberalism are opposing forces. It’s time the real Left stand up to Hillary, Gore, and all the other corporate mouthpieces who are selling liberalism like it’s a brand name.

…Meet Marlenny Franco. A textile worker in the Dominican Republic and the mother of a new born child, Marlenny stood up to her bosses at the Hanes factory where she works to stop discrimination against women and unsafe conditions. The company retaliated by firing her, along with many others who protested. And now students are holding Kevin Bacon accountable.

The connection? Kevin Bacon is a paid celebrity spokesperson for Hanes, helping to sell the company’s t-shirts and underwear through a high profile ad campaign. The students are asking Bacon, who has a reputation for liberal politics, to use his status to help stop labor abuses at Hanes overseas textile plants.

The students, who are part of a national organization called United Students Against Sweatshops, confronted Bacon in New York at the premiere of his film “Death Sentence.” According to Connor X, a Columbia University student who held a banner at the protest reading “Kevin Bacon: Tell Hanes to Stop the Exploitation of Workers,” Mr. Bacon came up to the protesters and promised he would look into the situation.

But since then, say the activists, there has been no follow-up from Mr. Bacon’s camp and the situation at the factory has only gotten worse. In response, the activists have launched a national campaign, with student protesters showing up to challenge Mr. Bacon at events across the country - from the Emmy awards, where they say their protest won a brief glimpse on national TV, to small-town concerts by the Bacon Brothers, the rock band led by Kevin Bacon and his lesser known brother Michael.

In keeping with the times, they have even launched a website, titled Six Degrees of Exploitation.com, and a group on Facebook, which boasts nearly 1000 members, all to shine a light on conditions at the Dominican factory.

The students’ claims about sweatshop conditions at the Dominican Hanes factory are backed up by an investigation by a leading labor rights monitoring organization, the Worker Rights Consortium, which counts 175 colleges and universities among its members. The organization released a report in June, finding that workers at the TOS Dominicana factory, owned and operated by Hanes, are subjected to unlawful forced overtime and psychological abuse and that the company has systemically fired workers who have chosen to join together in a union.

The situation is indeed disturbing. Workers at the Hanes plant earn about $1.25 an hour. Workers interviewed for this article reported that they had to borrow money most weeks just to cover food, rent and medicine for their families, and often had to forgo extra expenses such as telephones. With such low wages, many workers reported that to make ends meet they had to work extra shifts, amounting to up to 72 hours in a week.

read more…

Please visit Six Degrees of Exploitation.com to sign a petition.

Update: A look at the working conditions in the Hanes/Wal-Mart factory: