SLAC
Student Labor Action Coalition
Madison, WI
Press Release for Demand Day September 28, 2005
UW STUDENT GROUP JOINS MASSIVE NATIONAL CAMPAIGN: COLLEGIATE APPAREL MUST BE MADE IN UNION FACTORIES!
Collegiate Apparel Brands Will be Required to Source Goods from Union Factories; Living Wages Will be Negotiated
On Wednesday, September 28, students at 42 major American universities will announce a new national movement to end sweatshop production of collegiate apparel. On the University of Wisconsin campus, the Student Labor Action Coalition (SLAC) will present these demands to the press and to the UW administration at 12:45 PM, September 28, at the top of Bascom Hill. The new campaign marks the culmination of SLAC's seven-year struggle for justice in the global garment industry.
As before, SLAC's members hope to leverage their university's market power to support movements for workplace democracy both in the U.S. and abroad. But their new campaign takes this model a step further. The demands are as follows: First, by requiring its licensees to source a certain percentage of their goods from union factories, UW will create market demand and breathing space for legitimate, democratic, and representative unions in the developing world and the global North. Second, the University will require licensed brands to pay their supplier factories more per item, allowing workers to realistically demand living wages of their managers. The race-to-the-bottom, at least in collegiate apparel, is reversed. SLAC hopes that the new policy will consolidate gains made by workers and unions all over the world, particularly in developing nations.
SLAC member Gabriela Varela said of the new campaign, "By requiring Nike, Adidas, and Champion to buy their goods from union factories, the new national movement will address the cruelty of the global garment industry the best and only way we know how: by allowing empowered workers to exercise control over their own workplaces."
John Bruning of SLAC added, "International labor monitors have found that sweatshop production of collegiate apparel is rampant -- it happens in El Salvador, Mexico, Lesotho, Indonesia, Haiti, Thailand, the United States, and elsewhere. And they've also found that well-meaning university policies aren't enough, that even independent monitoring can't prevent the child labor, starvation wages, violence, and sexual abuse that are endemic in the industry. Independent labor monitoring organizations believe, as we believe, that only freedom of association and worker-empowerment by way of unions can end these practices."
Another SLAC member, Liana Dalton, said, "Where workers have made strides toward representation and collective bargaining -- like the Kukdong factory in Mexico, and the Just Garments facility in El Salvador -- we've seen tremendous improvement. But the race to the bottom dynamic -- a constant search for lower wages, more oppressive conditions, and less worker oversight-threatens the survival of such factories and severely limits the gains that workers can achieve. But by requiring corporations to source their goods from union factories, the impetus for factory owners to bust unions all but disappears. And by requiring the multinational corporations to pay local factories more for each item they buy, workers will finally be able to negotiate with factory owners for a living wage."
SLAC member Ashok Kumar concluded, "The new campaign -- with its emphasis on workers, unions, and solidarity across borders -- represents a major step forward: in the age of globalized markets, we are seeing the birth of a globalized labor movement."
PRESS CONFERENCE Wednesday, September 28, 2005 12:45 PM Top of Bascom Hill
The Forty-Two Schools Participating in the Union Apparel Campaign
1. Smith 2. Purdue 3. UW-Madison 4. Georgetown 5. UC Riverside 6. Macalester 7. Indiana University 8. Grand Valley State 9. University of Pittsburgh 10. Skidmore 11. UI-Urbana Champaign 12. Michigan State 13. University of Michigan 14. UC-Irvine 15. University of Colorado 16. Loyola Chicago 17. Columbia 18. UNC-Chapel Hill 19. MIT 20. Duke 21. Santa Clara U 22. UC San Diego 23. University S. Mississippi 24. UC Santa Cruz 25. UC Davis 26. University of Maine 27. U-Mass Amherst 28. UC- Berkeley 29. UConn 30. Cornell 31. Brandeis 32. Kansas State University 33. SUNY Stonybrook 34. Boston College 35. St. Louis U 36. Yale 37. Bowdoin 38. Temple 39. University of Rhode Island 40. Brown 41. USC 42. UC Santa Barbara
Endorsing Organizations
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Communication Workers of America (CWA) United Steelworkers (USW) United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) Campaign for Labor Rights International Labor Rights Fund South Central Federation of Labor (Wisconsin) UW-Madison Teaching Assistants' Association Wisconsin State Employee Action Coalition Alliance for Global Justice American Rights at Work Campus Progress Citizens Trade Campaign Educating for Justice Global Exchange League of Young Voters National Youth Advocacy Coalition Nicaragua Network Not with Our Money Polaris Project Pride at Work Project South Student Farmworker Alliance STITCH Student Action with Farmworkers Sweatfree Communities United States Student Association Walmart Watch
Pictures from Demand Day, September 28, 2005