Students just say no to sweatshop labor

Salt shakers
August 1999

Students just say no to sweatshop labor
Pressured by students throughout the country who are insisting that their school-emblemed sweats and other athletic gear not originate through sweatshop labor, 17 U.S. colleges and universities have joined a monitoring association organized to combat exploitative labor conditions. For years, colleges and universites have made a lucrative business of licensing their school emblems to manufacturers without paying too much attention to the conditions under which the clothing has been produced. In the last two years a growing student movement has focused attention on this issue.

Students have boycotted school-emblemed clothing and demonstrated, demanding that their school administrations ensure that the clothing they purchase or license be sweatshop free. The 17 schools, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, and Notre Dame, now joining the Fair Labor Association (FLA) are expected to be a vanguard that encourages other educational institutions to follow suit. The FLA was established by the Clinton Adminstration, human rights organizations, and industry heavyweights such as Nike, Liz Clairborne, and Reeboks in a voluntary effort to monitor factory conditions and worker treatment in both U.S. and foreign clothing plants.

The inclusion of such well-known academic institutions into the FLA is expected to greatly enhance the authority of the group, since it is anticipated that most of the companies which are licensed to produce school-emblemed apparel will now agree to join the FLA and accept its standards. Those standards require minimum ages for workers in apparel manufacturing and that workers' right to organize be respected. Though student leaders say this move is a step in the right direction, some argue that the FLA needs to go further. They fault the existing code of conduct for not guaranteeing workers the right to a living wage and for requiring outside inspection of only 10 percent of clothing facilities each year.

Straight from the Heartland
For over ten years, the Heartland Center in the diocese of Gary in northwest Indiana has brought to life the principles of Catholic social teaching to a socially and economically changing area.

Northwest Indiana includes a number of ethnic concentrations, especially Hispanic, African, and Slavic Americans, who have strong ties to their churches and local industries. Between 1970 and 1989, however, manufacturing-sector employment dropped 54 percent, and the population declined 13 percent. The resulting unemployment, economic hardship, and rollbacks of social services-along with an accompanying increase in racial tension-presented a set of social problems the Heartland Center sought to address. The center, founded by three Jesuit priests in 1987, sees its mission as one of research and analysis, education, and companionship with the poor and marginalized, three goals that resonate with the Jesuit traditions of research, education, and service.

Projects have included research on welfare assistance and job-retention programs and a reflection process on the U.S. bishops' pastoral letter on the economy, The Challenge of Peace. The center has analyzed crime in the area and developed a regional quality-of-life index. It has also studied the social profile of welfare-to-work recipients, the ethnicity-poverty-infant mortality relationship, and migration into the area. Functioning as the diocese's office of peace and justice, it has helped to establish parish peace and social-justice commissions.

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