Charles Kernaghan, Scourge of Sweatshops, Is Dead at 74

Charles Kernaghan, who with a single-minded ardour and tireless power uncovered the prevalence of sweatshop-made items in America’s toy sections, shops and movie star style traces, died on June 1 at his residence in Manhattan. He was 74.

His sister, Maryellen Kernaghan, introduced the loss of life however didn’t present a trigger.

Because the longtime director of a shoestring group referred to as the Nationwide Labor Committee, Mr. Kernaghan was among the many first activists to point out that the seemingly magical drop in costs for a variety of shopper items within the Eighties and ’90s was a results of American firms’ shift of manufacturing to growing nations, the place employees typically toiled in harmful situations for pennies an hour.

He specialised within the high-profile takedown, going after manufacturers like Nike, Disney and Walmart. He focused Bratz dolls, Eddie Bauer out of doors put on and Microsoft wi-fi mice. In 2007 he confirmed that crucifixes bought at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan got here from a Chinese language sweatshop.

A self-described introvert, Mr. Kernaghan turned a special particular person in entrance of an viewers. He might communicate for hours, rattling off tales and knowledge in a method that gave a human face to the free-trade debate.

“He had a worldview, which is that behind all of the comfortable discuss of the attire {industry} and company social duty was the truth is a brutal, exploitative {industry} that was based mostly on a world race to the underside, and he took it upon himself to show that hypocrisy,” Mark Levinson, the chief economist at Employees United and the Service Workers Worldwide Union, mentioned in a telephone interview. “And he did it brilliantly.”

Mr. Kernaghan’s first huge exposé got here in 1992, when he and his colleagues confirmed how American assist backed the development of sweatshops within the growing world. Their report, which offered the premise for a “60 Minutes” phase, led to laws banning U.S. help for factories that don’t meet labor and security requirements.

In 1995, after spending months investigating El Salvadoran factories that provided the Hole, he launched a report displaying how a lot the attire firm relied on sweatshop labor. To ram his level residence, he took one of many employees, a 15-year-old woman named Judith Viera, on a 14-city talking tour.

At first, the Hole denied his allegations; then it blamed its suppliers. However after protests erupted in opposition to the corporate, it agreed to permit impartial screens into the vegetation.

Whereas Mr. Kernaghan was on a analysis journey to a Hole provider in Honduras, a employee slipped him a tag with a special title on it: that of the tv host Kathie Lee Gifford. She was incomes $9 million a yr licensing her title to a model bought at Walmart, and boasting that a part of the proceeds went to charity.

Mr. Kernaghan did extra digging, and in April 1996 he instructed Congress what he had discovered: To make Ms. Gifford’s clothes, ladies as younger as 15 labored for 31 cents an hour, 75 hours per week.

Two days later, Ms. Gifford, on her present “Reside With Regis and Kathie Lee,” fought again tears as she tried to defend herself, calling Mr. Kernaghan’s testimony “a vicious assault.”

However she finally agreed to permit screens, and Mr. Kernaghan — now often called “the person who made Kathie Lee cry” — turned a drive for the attire {industry} to reckon with. In 1997 he rented a airplane to fly over the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, trailing a banner that learn, “Disney Makes use of Sweatshops.”

“Charlie had a knack for publicity,” Jo-Ann Mort, a communications guide who labored with garment-industry unions, mentioned in a telephone interview. “He knew easy methods to get public consideration on the difficulty.”

When he wasn’t in Central America or Asia, he was touring the lecture circuit. He gave as much as 85 speeches a yr, typically with a sweatshop employee in tow, or with a bag from which he would pull a T-shirt or sweater and yell, “There’s blood on this garment!”

He typically spoke on faculty campuses, and within the late Nineties he helped encourage the scholar anti-sweatshop motion, which in flip turned a big a part of the anti-free-trade coalition of the 2000s.

“He was a dynamic orator who might debate anybody on these points,” mentioned Peter Romer-Friedman, a civil rights lawyer who helped lead the campus anti-sweatshop motion as an undergraduate on the College of Michigan, and who considers Mr. Kernaghan a mentor. “He was only one these guys, you could possibly really feel the fervour right down to his bones.”

Charles Patrick Kernaghan was born on April 2, 1948, in Brooklyn. His father, Andrew, was a Scottish immigrant who put in acoustic tiles, and his mom, Mary (Znojemsky) Kernaghan, was a volunteer social employee born in what was then Czechoslovakia.

His mother and father instilled in Charles a robust sense of social justice: They fostered greater than 20 youngsters, they usually pushed him, his sister and his brother towards community-focused careers. (His sister labored for a nonprofit, and his brother, John, who died in 1990, was a Jesuit priest).

His sister is his solely fast survivor.

Mr. Kernaghan acquired a level in psychology from Loyola College in Chicago in 1970, and a grasp’s in the identical topic from the New Faculty for Social Analysis in Manhattan in 1975. He later taught at Duquesne College, in Pittsburgh, however he quickly deserted his educational aspirations.

For some time, he drifted. In America and through prolonged journeys by Europe and the Center East, he labored as a carpenter, a steward and a stevedore; at one level he drove a cab late at evening in New York Metropolis, with a hatchet on his dashboard to dissuade robbers.

He additionally took up images, aspiring to make use of his digicam to disclose social injustice. In 1985 Mr. Kernaghan joined a peace march in El Salvador, organized to protest government-sanctioned violence in opposition to clergymen and labor leaders. He introduced his tools, and a number of other of his pictures appeared in main newspapers, together with The New York Instances.

It was throughout that journey that he first encountered members of the Nationwide Labor Committee in Help of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador, a tiny New York-based group that operated out of workplace area offered by a garment employees union. By it, he turned energetic within the motion to show America’s position in supporting right-wing violence in Central America, and he finally joined the committee’s employees. He turned director in 1990.

As he deepened his involvement, Mr. Kernaghan started to obtain threatening telephone calls telling him to cease his activism. One evening in 1988, he was asleep in his Manhattan residence when a person got here by the window, introduced, “I’m going to kill you,” and stabbed him within the chest with a bread knife.

Medics took Mr. Kernaghan to the hospital, however when medical doctors instructed him that he didn’t have any life-threatening accidents, he slipped out and was again at work a couple of days later. The assailant was by no means caught.

Mr. Kernaghan’s group moved in 2008 to Pittsburgh on the invitation of the United Metal Employees union. It additionally modified its title to the much less unwieldy Institute for International Labor and Human Rights.

He introduced his retirement in 2017. However he insisted that there was extra work to be achieved.

“If our garments might discuss,” he instructed The Pittsburgh Submit-Gazette in 2012, “they might be screaming.”