Fueled by a recent victory over a Terp gear manufacturer known to abuse its workers, anti-sweatshop activists are combining resources with other student groups to link fair labor practices and more popular causes like environmentalism.
MaryPIRG, Feminism Without Borders, Terps for Choice and the Pride Alliance sponsored a discussion panel Tuesday night called “Globalization, Sweatshops, Us,” featuring three speakers who brought the issue of sweatshop labor a little closer to home for students.
The groups that hosted the event — and comprised a majority of the audience in the Jimenez building — were largely responsible for the university’s termination this year of its contract with Russell Athletic, a company that manufactured university apparel in factories that did not meet fair labor standards.
The groups’ new goals are to inform students and broaden horizons to other causes associated with unfair labor practices, said Eric Sim, a junior English and philosophy major who helped to organize the event.
“This workers’ rights activist base is kind of teaming up with the environmental activist base, because it’s all linked together— sustainability, social justice and environmental justice,” he said.
Even as the controversy over Russell Athletic has cooled, guest speaker Jack Mahoney of United Workers Against Sweatshops spoke about the impact of the company’s treatment of its workers, which included firing them for unionizing.
Mahoney traveled around the country with factory workers as the pressure was mounting for universities to cut their contracts with the company, making their first stop at this university, where the workers saw their very own handiwork displayed on a rack in the University Book Center.
“This particular Russell [sweatshirt] was fifty-something dollars, and they were floored… because they earn $60 a week, and they were making thousands upon thousands of these hooded sweatshirts in that period of time, and so that first sweatshirt they made, the price of that for the consumer was going to pay their salary,” Mahoney said.
“Obviously they knew they were being exploited, but for the first time, to just really take in the scale of the exploitation from these brands … that was powerful for me,” he added.
Guest speaker Bama Athreya of the International Labor Rights Forum said many
Americans consider the fair labor issue to be already solved because of free trade agreements already in place, when these agreements actually give benefits to the corporations — not the workers.
“The most exploitative, slave-like conditions continue to exist, continue to produce commodities that show up in our underwear, in the chocolate bars in the stores,” Athreya said. “I mean, it’s stuff that we use day-to-day, and we can now identify the small handful of global trading corporations that are at the heart of the problem, but we still need action to hold them accountable.”
Zach Howe, a junior government and politics major and member of MaryPIRG, said his group has more in store in terms of addressing unfair labor, including plans to convince the Inter-Fraternity Council and the Pan-Hellenic Association to buy sweatshop-free clothes to promote fair labor.
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