A New Front in the Sweatshop Wars?

Watchdog groups are anxious to expose and condemn campus stores whose subcontractors use sweatshop labor to make apparel.

ALSO SEE: Relying on Overseas Labor

But if they want to find widespread use of cheap, foreign labor, they need to step out of the campus stores and walk into the libraries.

Large digitizing projects undertaken by prominent institutions -- including Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, and the Library of Congress -- have saved lots of money by using companies that subcontract the bulk of their labor-intensive work to vendors in Barbados, India, and Mexico, among other countries.

The work can involve using scanning devices and optical-character-recognition software, then double-checking electronic texts against originals to correct errors or, frequently, retyping entire articles and even books -- at least twice -- and comparing the texts for accuracy. In the process, information about the texts often is added in the form of electronic "tags," which make searching on the Web easier.

No Watchdog

Most archivists and librarians support sending digitizing jobs overseas. Because it lowers their costs, they can put more scholarly texts online, they say. But the possibility that overseas keyboarding might raise the same fair labor issues that have confronted overseas apparel manufacturers has prompted people on some campuses to start asking questions, both of contractors and of themselves. "The principle of sending this work offshore, especially to the third world, is something I think American universities should be concerned with," says Richard Strassberg, associate director of the industrial-and-labor-relations library at Cornell University.

Independent monitoring organizations like the Worker Rights Consortium focus only on overseas factories where collegiate apparel is made. No comparable organizations monitor pay and working conditions in keyboarding facilities overseas, leaving colleges and other scholarly enterprises to rely largely on vendors for assurances that labor conditions are reasonable.

So far, little evidence has come to light to show that colleges profit financially from digitizing ventures, or that employees of overseas keyboarding companies that sign contracts with American colleges are poorly paid or work in substandard conditions. Indeed, many of those workers are said to be paid well above the local minimum wage to engage in efforts that librarians hope will further the democratization of information. Many such academic and commercial digitizing projects are under way, and their number is expected to grow.

Some campus leaders who are active in Harvard University's anti-sweatshop and living-wage campaigns argue that overseas keyboarding contracts are another opportunity for the university and its affiliates to demonstrate global social responsibility -- or fail to do so. The issue arose in July, when the Harvard Crimson announced plans to digitize more than 100 years of back issues by using inexpensive data-entry workers in Cambodia and India. The independent student newspaper's plans provoked a wave of soul-searching on the Harvard campus. As one student not associated with the Crimson put it: "Who benefits from that cost savings, and who's hurt by it?"

"There isn't the luxury of 'innocent till proven guilty' in the global economy," says Benjamin L. McKean, a Harvard senior who is a leader in the anti-sweatshop efforts. At the least, he says, colleges could require that information about wages, working conditions, and factory locations be disclosed in any contract for data-entry or other repetitive information-processing tasks.

Many librarians and others who are involved in digitizing scholarly materials say they, too, are concerned about the labor conditions for overseas workers who do the lion's share of keyboarding for large projects. In many cases, colleges already include language in their contracts requiring that workers be paid a prevailing wage and be offered reasonable working conditions.

But few colleges actually include a living-wage clause in their codes of conduct, says Dara O'Rourke, an assistant professor of urban studies and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. O'Rourke, who has been active in a coalition of universities investigating working conditions in overseas apparel factories, says he knows of no case in which a university has enforced a living-wage clause for apparel manufacture or any other type of contract work done outside of the United States.

Visiting Barbados and India

Some officials say they aren't relying solely on information provided by vendors. Eileen Gifford Fenton is director of production for JSTOR, a digital-archiving organization whose databases are widely used by many colleges. She has visited factories in Barbados and India that are used by Apex E-Publishing Data Services and by Digital Imaging, two of the largest companies involved in the overseas outsourcing of scholarly digitizing projects.

"We went to not only understand how they are set up, but to reassure ourselves that the working conditions were satisfactory," says Ms. Fenton. "I would say the facilities in both countries were up to par with U.S. standards for working conditions, and they stood out as nice structures compared to some of the other facilities in the area."

On the other hand, she says, reasonable pay-scale information is hard to come by. "We didn't do an independent study to determine whether or not they're paying a livable wage."

Subesh Das, who served for seven years as labor commissioner for the Indian state of West Bengal, says that the keyboarding businesses there require such a high level of skill that the workers, who are relatively highly educated, are typically paid well above minimum wage. The minimum wage in most Indian provinces hovers at around $30 per month, Mr. Das says. Workers in keyboarding plants usually are paid about four times that amount, he adds. "The use of the computer is so limited in India that these jobs are generally considered very highly skilled jobs."

Apex officials insist that because their company is owned jointly by Indian and American interests, it adheres to high standards. "Our founder is Indian, and the company was founded with the intention of creating good jobs over there," says Joel B. Poznansky, the president.

In the Crimson's case, labor advocates on the Harvard campus say they have been at least partly reassured -- by their own inspection, as well as by a company involved in the digitizing effort -- that the data-entry work is helping, rather than exploiting, the workers who are handling it. "The most important things are wages, health and safety, and the right to organize," says Mr. McKean, the student activist.

One of the Crimson's contractors is Digital Divide Data, a small company in Phnom Penh that was founded by Jeremy Hockenstein, a 1993 Harvard graduate, and four associates. For this job, the company hired 20 Cambodians, many of whom are disabled. They type an average of 30 words a minute and produce text with a 99.995 percent or higher accuracy, he says. "It's a group that's had particularly hard access to jobs."

The Boston Globe reported in an article that student activists at Harvard were dismayed that the Crimson was exploiting overseas workers by not paying them a living wage. But Mr. Hockenstein says the pay issues need to be clarified. The Crimson contract is worth $45,000 over six months, he notes. Along with some additional academic contracts, he says it provides the Phnom Penh workers with salaries of $200 to $300 a month. It costs about $100 a month for a family of six to live in Phnom Penh. Mr. Hockenstein says Digital Divide Data is a nonprofit organization, in which profits are shared with workers and reinvested to create new jobs. It operates in two six-hour shifts, six days a week. Workers are salaried, have subsidized health care, and receive a one-hour English lesson each day. Cambodians with good English and computer skills "can expect to find work for up to 10 times the minimum wage" of $45 a month, says Jody McPhillips, associate editor of The Cambodia Daily, an English-Khmer newspaper published in Phnom Penh.

Scholars in developing countries, where many page-scanning, data-entry, and simple text-tagging jobs are now sent, will be among the biggest beneficiaries of the effort to put journals and texts on the Web, says Andrew Odlyzko, director of the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Digital-scanning technologies and low data-entry costs permit both nonprofit and commercial publishers to put rare texts and complete sets of scholarly journals online at almost no added cost to subscribers.

"I expect they will be making all of this material available -- in many cases, 100 or 200 years of back issues of some journals -- quite inexpensively," says Mr. Odlyzko. Instead of charging a single price to all subscribers, he says, publishers could lower their prices for scholars and research institutions in developing countries.

In the past, older volumes would have been microfilmed. But for large-scale scholarly projects, "where you expect things to last," microfilm processes are being replaced by digital technologies, says James J. O'Donnell, vice provost for information systems and computing and a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Last year alone, the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service put about 10,000 volumes online with help from overseas workers who typed the electronic tags for works published on the Web. Most of them were books that hadn't circulated for 30 years or more. "Now we see more than one million hits -- from around the world -- on those books," which no one is charged for using, says John Price Wilkin, head of the service.

Digitizing tasks that require a high level of specialized knowledge, or for which expensive equipment has been developed, are still done within universities. Mr. Wilkin notes that Michigan has bought optical-character-recognition equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars.

The equipment, running six character-recognition programs at once, creates a reasonably accurate and searchable digital text of any volume for three to five cents a page. A company using the same equipment overseas would charge the university as much as 50 cents a page to cover its management expenses and make a profit, Mr. Wilkin says.

But work like page scanning or rekeying of the text by two different typists, and comparing the texts for accuracy, is usually affordable only if done with overseas labor. "It's global economics," says James Nye, director of the South Asia Language and Area Center at the University of Chicago. More important, he adds, "it is the kind of work that most people don't do in the States, because it's not thought to be very interesting."

David Seaman, director of the University of Virginia's Text Center, says universities do benefit from the lower pay scales overseas. "But pricing is only one of our concerns. We are concerned just as much with [the] quality" of the work, he says.

For his part, Harvard's Mr. McKean says he is not opposed to sending data-entry or other information-processing jobs overseas. But he is troubled by the realization that a living wage in Cambodia means something very different from a living wage in Cambridge, Mass., where "the standard of living is so different."

"We want people in countries like Cambodia and elsewhere to get good jobs so they can raise their standard of living," he says. "The question I'm raising is whether paying a living wage in Cambodia is enough."

• Carnegie Mellon University and Simmons College received a $550,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to buy equipment to begin digitizing one million books, including rare foreign manuscripts and research texts, that are part of the Books for College Libraries collection. The governments of India and China have offered to undertake the scanning tasks and to pay the wages of the workers involved, in exchange for unrestricted access to the digitized collection.
• ProQuest Information and Learning Company, a commercial archiving business, is working with an academic consortium to produce digital editions of up to 24,000 texts from England, produced between 1473 and 1700. The project will use the services of Apex ePublishing Data Services, a large American outsourcing company with facilities in the cities of Bangalore, Chenai, Guntur, Hyderabad, and Rajkot, in India (http://www.umi.com/products/pt-product-EarlyAMProse.shtml).
• Questia Media America Inc., a commercial venture that has developed an online library service for undergraduates doing humanities and social-science research, has signed contracts with several large vendors for overseas work to digitize the 65,000 volumes in its subscription database (http://www.questia.com/aboutQuestia/exploreLibrary.html").
• The University of Chicago's Digital South Asia Library and Digital Dictionaries of South Asia projects, each financed by grants of $200,000 a year for three years from the U.S. Department of Education, rely on data-entry workers in Madras and Bombay, India, and in Beijing. Many of the original materials being digitized are available only in India, where the lowest-paid workers on the project earn the equivalent of $120 a month (http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries).