Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify.
I'm going to mention our experiences with the U.S.-Jordan free trade agreement. I had never heard of the U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement until mid-2005, when guest workers started calling us from Jordan, begging for help and saying: they are beating us; they've stripped us of our passports; they're raping our women; they're starving us; they're not giving us our wages. It just came out of the blue. It was shocking.
We went to Jordan and investigated. We put out a major report in May of 2006. It documented that the garment industry in Jordan, under the free trade agreement with the United States, was entirely foreign guest workers, because the Jordanians wouldn't work in a factory. At least 90% of the workers were foreign guest workers from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, China, and so on. They got to Jordan and were stripped of their passports, which is the crime of human trafficking. They were locked into the factories. They were working 12, 14, 15, and 16 hours a day. They were working seven days a week.
We put out that report and there was a very decent impact. Some factories were cleaned up. But what we also pointed out was that the big winner in this was China, because the vast majority of the textiles come from China and 63% of the value of the garment is in textiles. So the U.S.-Jordan free trade agreement actually benefited China more than anyone else: we estimate about $100 million a year in tariff breaks for their textiles to enter the United States.
I want to just give you an update of a factory right now. Yesterday and today, we've been investigating this factory in Jordan. It's called the Classic Fashion Apparel factory. It's a big operation, with six factories in the Al-Hassan industrial zone--