LABOUR-AMERICAS: Students Push for Sweatshop-Free Clothes

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 11 1998 (IPS) - Students across the United States are pushing their universities to join an anti-sweatshop crusade to make sure all clothes bearing university logos are made under policies that protect overseas workers.

The movement started months ago but the release last week of a report by eight U.S. students who visited garment factories in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua last August, has heightened the pressure for the top U.S. academies to support good labour practises in their own logo-bearing clothing lines.

“We want all of the clothing that is produced for export to the United States, starting with the clothes bearing our universities’ logos, to be produced under fair and humane conditions,” the eight co-authors of ‘Behind Closed Doors: The Workers Who Make Our Clothes’ wrote following their visit.

“We feel very strongly that any code of conduct governing university procurement must include full public disclosure of factory names and addresses, and implement a serious living wage policy, which is tied to the cost of basic necessities for the average-sized family,” the students added.

The report on the visit – which was organised by the National Labour Committee, a New York-based rights group – described poor working conditions and low wages among the largely female workforces in all three Central American countries.

At El Salvador’s Doall Factory, for example, workers earn only some 294 colones (or about 33 dollars) a week, or about 51 percent of “the basic basket of essential goods and services that the average family needs to survive in relative poverty”, according to delegation member Cori Zagarell of Grinnell University.

In the Ecotex factory in Honduras, by contrast, average pay was only equivalent to 26 dollars a week – or about 44 cents an hour for a standard 59-hour workweek.

At the Chelsea Factory in Honduras, the students reported seeing 12- and 13-year-old children stitching clothes in a poorly- ventilated workplace where many workers suffered from headaches, bronchial problems and hand pain. In all the various free-trade zones and factories visited, workers were frequently denied benefits and harrassed if they attempted to form unions.

That picture of sweatshop labour has become a familiar one in the United States, thanks to publicity campaigns by groups like the National Labour Committee – including one which now tries to boost awareness of Central American labour conditions among U.S. college students.

In response, several universities have adopted codes of conduct to respond to the bad publicity on many campuses about sweatshop labour. In March, Duke University in North Carolina agreed to a code which would require all manufacturers providing Duke clothing to disclose factory locations and allow for independent monitoring of factories. Brown University followed suit in April.

In recent months, the Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC), which mediates between 160 universities and the clothing manufacturers who use the universities’ logos on apparel, has tried to write a code of conduct for all factories that will produce the university- bound clothes.

The CLC initiative has resulted in the formation of a task force to create a code of conduct for the universities with which it deals. But that effort is already being criticised by some students for not involving them in the discussions about what should be included in the code of conduct.

“The work that we try to do to improve conditions for the women and men who work in the maquilas and make the clothes we buy can only be done in cooperation and consultation with the workers themselves and the local groups who understand the local situation,” argued Laura McSpedon, a delegation member who works for United Students Against Sweatshops.

United Students Against Sweatshops was formed last July to push for certain minimum conditions that any codes of conduct would need to contain – including the promise of a “living wage” for garment workers.

“Ignoring is exactly what the CLC is trying to do … (to) make codes of conduct without ever speaking to the workers themselves,” McSpedon said.

Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the National Labour Committee, has contended that many codes of conduct are merely “damage-control” efforts, designed to reduce the bad publicity that has been attached to sweatshop labour without actually improving conditions.

If companies really intend to honour labour rights in the factories where they subcontract for work, they must allow independent groups – including human rights and religious groups, and women’s organisations – to monitor their activities, he said.