Background on full public disclosure: Gaining full public disclosure of factory locations was one of USAS¹ first major victories. While companies initially claimed that this information was an ³industry secret² or that they themselves didn¹t even know the locations of these factories, in the end they ceded to students and to the public an important tool for holding them and our universities accountable for factory conditions. Not only do factory disclosure lists help us connect with workers producing our clothes, but they are a step towards forcing corporations to be more transparent and accountable to the public in their business practices. As consumers, and student at universities who profit from the sale of licensed apparel, we have the right to know basic information about the production of this clothing. Demanding disclosure is a way of checking corporate power‹once they admit to the public where and how they are making their profits, we can begin to demand that they curb their exploitative practices.
Two years ago another campaign emerged for the disclosure of ³objective measures.² These included a wide range of data, from wages and working hours to the number of bathrooms in each factory, that students were preparing to demand from companies. This campaign was never carried out for a variety of reasons, one of the major ones being that the focus was too broad and the goals difficult to understand. We believe that a wage disclosure campaign will avoid these pitfalls by being focused directly around wages and as an integral step in the clearly targeted ³Raise the Floor² campaign.
The goal of wage disclosure: After a successful campaign for wage disclosure, students and the public will be able to access the pay scale from factories around the world that produce collegiate licensed clothing. Companies should be required to make this data public, so that any consumer or student can access this most basic information on the production of the clothes they buy. This will give us some of the vital information needed to pressure companies to pay living wages in all of their factories. If companies accurately disclose this data, it will be proof to the public and to the companies themselves that workers are not earning living wages in the vast majority of cases. It will also help us to hold companies accountable for the wages workers are earning, and when the campaign is realized, to ensure that those are living wages. Without wage disclosure, it is more difficult to prove how much companies are paying workers in their supplier factories, just as before we had disclosure of factory locations, it was harder to tie companies to specific factories where labor abuses were uncovered.
Our demands: We are asking our administrators and licensing departments to require that licensees disclose the wages being paid to workers in factories producing licensed goods. These figures would then be made available to the public in the same way that licensees are currently required to disclose factory locations.