Fruit of the Loom's seedy deal: Irish labor ripe for picking.

• Author: Flanders, Laura

Crouched on the bayshore of northern Donegal, the entry to Buncrana is marked by a municipal welcome sign which boasts that this small Irish town is twinned with Campbellsville, Kentucky.

Along with small-town solidarity, what the two communities share is an intimate relationship with the garment-maker Fruit of the Loom. On St. Patrick's Day this year, a huge truck pulled out of the lowlying Buncrana plant and lumbered into town. Small girls in traditional dress danced gingerly on the flatbed. To their left, Irish flags fluttered green and gold; to the right, stars and stripes. Above the girls, their audience, and the waiting traffic, the bold apple-and-grape logo stood out, familiar to underwear-wearers around the world.

Fruit of the Loom set up shop in Buncrana five years before Western Europe opened up as a free-trade zone. The company bought a local outfit, enlarged the site, and opened a manufacturing plant to spin yarn imported from the United States into underwear and other clothing. A few years later, the company announced plans to pair its southern Irish operation with a couple of spinning plants in the British-controlled North. Now yarn for the manufacturing shop in Buncrana comes directly from Derry ("Londonderry" to the British) less than thirty miles away across the border.

"We have no doubt that as in Donegal, we will find people in Northern Ireland who are equally good at adapting to our production processes," declared William Farley, company chair in 1990. "I also have no doubt that our investment in Northern Ireland will achieve the same success as our plants in the Republic of Ireland."

He was not wrong. Since 1989, Fruit of the Loom's international sales of "active wear" have almost tripled, according to the company's 1993 year-end report. By acquiring local facilities and building new plants within the European trade zone, Fruit of the Loom reached 350 million potential buyers and got local taxpayers' money to do it. Because of the dismal employment situation in both places, the Irish Republic and the British government wooed Fruit of the Loom with grants for employee training and the acquisition of property and equipment.

"When it was announced that Fruit of the Loom were to open a factory, there was great rejoicing," says journalist and veteran organizer Eamonn McCann, over a pint glass filled with water in Derry's popular Dungloe pub. "Now that we have the factory open and it's in production, if you go and talk to the workers at Fruit of the Loom, you will find that many of them want out of the factory. They don't like working there because they're not treated with any dignity there. They're not treated with any dignity there because the...