Free trade helps a tiny African country - with a price

"We've spent a lot of foreign aid in Africa, but it doesn't begin to do what AGOA is doing in Lesotho," says Daniel Bellegarde, deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy here. "All of the arable land is being farmed. There is no more land to move to, and each year the land is more depleted. If you do not have a mechanism to transition to a modern economy, this country is going to be in deep crisis.... That's what AGOA is meant to do, provide that transition."

But Lesotho's example also shows that the road to the global market economy is not always smooth. Factory jobs are highly sought after in a country with almost 40 percent unemployment. But union leaders criticize conditions in the factories and say that the government is ignoring labor and environmental abuses such as forced overtime and the river of unnaturally blue water that flows from one jeans factory in Tetsane.

"We have weak laws, and the investors are taking a chance here because we have weak laws," says Daniel Maraisane, general secretary of Lesotho's largest textile union, the Lesotho Clothing and Allied Workers Union.

While the factory day is certainly long, and 45-hour weeks are often extended when orders are plentiful, wages are high by Lesotho standards - a full-time security guard, for example, makes about $40 a month compared with $55 for factory work. And workers have legal recourse against unfair treatment.

There is, however, a huge cultural gap between the factory owners, most of whom are Taiwanese, and their local workers. Workers accuse their employers of racism, while owners say the workers chafe at the factories' rigorous schedules.

"There's just not enough education among the workers," says Jennifer Chen, head of Lesotho's exporters' association and owner of a large factory that produces shirts for Gap. Productivity among workers here is about one-third that in Taiwan, partly because workers are less experienced and partly because paying workers by the piece is illegal here.

Industrialization is changing Lesotho beyond the factory floor as well. In a country where many still dress in traditional pointed hats and thick woolen blankets, the vast number of women now going off to work is radically changing family life.

Single young women like Mantopi and her sister are often living away from their families for the first time. They can be subject to sexual harassment and abuse. Women like Marashalane Ramaliehe, a mother of two, have a hard time finding child care and frequently are subject to anger from their unemployed husbands, who believe they should be the breadwinners. Textile work is considered women's work, and more than 95 percent of factory jobs are held by women.

Some young women have also taken to selling sex to survive. Twenty-year-old Malehoa, who would not give her last name, came to Maseru a year ago from a village 250 miles away looking for factory work she heard was plentiful. But after months of searching unsuccessfully for a factory job, she now earns $100 a month as a prostitute. She sends most of the money home to her family, who think that she has found a good job sewing jeans.

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