Criticisms
By far the biggest international criticism of QIZs in Jordan is the humanitarian crisis within the factories. A comprehensive report by the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights found that Sri Lankan migrant workers were subject to "routine sexual abuse and rape."
The United States Trade Representative (USTR) designation of 13 factories throughout Jordan (under the US-Jordan Free Trade Agreement) has led to disastrous realities, gender inequality and gender based violence:
- "There are over 30,000 poor, mostly young women, foreign guest workers toiling in Jordan‘s largely foreign-owned garment factories sewing clothing for export to the United States. Under the Free Trade Agreement, those garments enter the U.S. duty-free.
- "The guest workers are from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, China, Nepal and Egypt. They earn less than three-quarters the wage of Jordanian garment workers, who account for only 15 to 25 percent of the total garment workforce. Jordanians earn $1.02 an hour while the foreign guest workers take home 74½ cents an hour. The Jordanians work eight hours a day, while the guest workers toil an average of 12 hours a day."
Read more about this topic: Qualifying Industrial Zone
Famous quotes containing the word criticisms:
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
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