Tiger Woods' complicity with Nike

After reading my article on the anti-sweatshop victory against Nike at the Unversty of Wisconsin (see posting below), a friend, Harry Kamberis, writes: “Never owned any Nike products and never will. What does [his endorsement of Nike] say about Tiger Woods?”

Good question. It is amazing how Tiger Woods has been shamed for his “private” life but has escapes opprobrium for his endorsement of Nike and his lucrative complicity with Nike in exploiting millions of men and women in sweatshops.

Woods seems insensitive to everything except golf and the millions it brings in endorsements. A total cad in private life but also in public life.

Another friend, Dan Turnquist, warns against a hasty proclamation of victory against Nike’s policies. He reminds that Nike can and does play “hardball with [universities] in terms of all the support it gives the athletic programs, free uniforms and all that. Not to mention buying off the coaches with lavish payments for endorsements. Nike does not give up easily.”


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Different anti-sweatshop strategy wins breakthrough

A factory in the Dominican Republic has begun production on sweatfree goods for delivery to university bookstores starting this fall or earlier. It is a breakthrough for a new strategy pioneered by the United Students against Sweatshops (USAS) and its partner, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC).

Under an arrangement that took two years of dialogue, Knights Apparel, one of the largest vendors of apparel bearing university logos, and the DR factory management have committed to pay workers a living wage, as defined by a study conducted by the WRC. Knights will pay its supplier factory a price designed to make this possible.

Both Knights and the factory management have also made a commitment to respect the right of workers to organize and to recognize any union chosen by the workers. The WRC will be responsible for verifying these and other standards.

A noted health and safety expert, Garret Brown, and a colleague have already made an inspection of the factory, and will work on health and safety issues in cooperation with worker representatives in the factory.

To meet expected demand for no-sweat goods, Knights has launched a new brand, Alta Garcia, which for now will be sold only to campus stores, beginning with those that have already declared their intention to carry the product.

Says Scott Nova, WRC director: “It is a pilot project, not a comprehensive solution, to the challenges we face, but it is an exciting step forward.”

The project puts into practice key elements of the WRC’s innovative Designated Suppliers Program (DSP). Its aim is to enhance the enforcement of university codes of conduct, which as stand-alone documents have proveen pretty much useless without the institutional and incentive framework to make them effective.

The WRC is a Washington- based research and investigative non-governmental group funded by more than 170 U.S. colleges and universities. Its 15-member governing board comprises five persons from each of the three WRC constituencies – the universities, the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), and independent labor rights experts comprising the WRC advisory council.

Illustrating the universities’ basic interest in the endeavor is the desire not to have their names smirched by complicity with sweatshops. Duke University’s “trademark licensing policy” affirms “a policy of protecting the symbols that are associated with its name and reputation as one of the finest universities in the country.”

Once resistant to any such policy, Duke in the spring of 1998 adopted one of the first comprehensive codes of conduct against sweatshops. Months later its officials joined Duke Students Against Sweatshops in signing an agreement committing the school to seek disclosure of all licensing factory locations, and it later had contracts with 409 licensees renegotiated to require such disclosure.

In the fiercely competitive global marketplace, however, this approach made little impact.

Duke’s director of trademark licensing, Jim Wilkerson, supported the founding of WRC in 2001, and went on to become a key officer of its board and of its 36-member DSP working group. It took an arduous decade of discussion, planning, negotiating, getting legal advice, writing and rewriting DSP – plus the pressure of USAS chapters on hesitant universities – for the WRC to come this far.

It still has a long way to go, as a phone conversation with Wilkerson, a fan of this blog, made me realize.

For a report by the Maquiladora Health & Safety Network, see “Network Assists Start-up of Real ‘no sweat’ garment factory.”

Note: The WRC is a joint initiative aimed at the procurement policies of universities. A parallel movement, the SweatFree Consortiium, is a joint initiative aimed at the procurement policies of governments, local, state, and national. See my December 14, 2009, posting on SweatFree Communities and the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium.

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A shameful embrace of sweatshops in a book on oppression of women

In their new best-selling book, “Half the Sky,” two New York Times writers, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, make an eloquent appeal for ending the worldwide oppression of women. Unfortunately, they mar their case by arguing that sweatshops are actually good for women.

“Sweatshops have given women a boost,” they write. They acknowledge “inequities of garment factories – and they are real – the forced overtime, the sexual harassment, the dangerous conditions.” But, they argue, sweatshop jobs are preferable to hoeing fields all day back in the home village.

In most of their book, Kristof and WuDunn recount shocking examples of how women in many countries suffer as 21st century slaves. Still, some women do not remain passive. They stand up and fight against the prevailing culture of oppression and, against all odds, make progress, often with outside help from non-governmental organizations (and sometimes from Kristof personally).

Yet “Half the Sky” fails to recognize the many courageous initiatives of factory workers in Indonesia and some other countries to improve their lot. In fighting against extreme abuses, these young women, too, welcome all thw support they can get from anti-sweatshop groups in the United States and Europe, whose citizens buy the T-shirts, dolls, and other consumer goods the women make.

In a long endnote, the co-authors point out that “a feminist critique…has emerged to dispute our arguments,” a critique that “contains an element of truth.” For this very limited insight into reality, Kristof and Dubunn rely completely on feminist sources, as the endnote makes clear. Too bad that they didn't interview a few sweatshop workers. If they had done so, their insights might have been substantially less limited.

In the latest of his periodic efforts to discredit the anti-sweatshop cause, Kristof goes so far to recycle a 15-year-old rumor saying:

-- that after Senator Tom Harkin in 1993 introduced a bill (never passed) to ban the import of goods made by girls and boys under 14, Bangladesh garment owners “promptly fired tens of thousands of these young girls,' and
-- that “many of them ended up in brothels and are presumably now dead of AIDS.”

This story pops up regularly in articles opposing the use of trade legislation to improve labor standards (the point about the children dying of AIDS is a new wrinkle). I personally know two researchers, one a Bangladeshi, who have devoted extensive efforts to verify this old story but have discovered no evidence to support it.

“Half of the Sky” offers this recommendation: “Instead of denouncing sweetshops, we in the West should be encouraging manufacturing in poor country.” The implied assumption -- that the anti-sweatshop movement discourages manufacturing in poor countries – is false.

Here’s one example, reported at length by Steven Greenhouse in the November 18 New York Times.

Soon after workers in a Honduras factory unionized, Russell Athletic, one of the country’s leading sportswear companies, closed the plants, making 1,200 workers jobless. That was a flagrant violation of the company’s licensing agreements.

Gearing up quickly, the United Students against Sweatshop launched a nationwide campaign in which, among other things, more than 100 colleges and universities agreed to sever or suspend their licensing agreements with Russell. Finally, over the September 14-15 weekend, Worker Rights Consortium, a USAS sister organization, signed a landmark agreement with Russell under which Russell will

-- reopen the Honduras factory with 1,200 rehired workers.
-- open another plant in Honduras to be covered by a union contract.

Moises Alvarado, president of the union at the closed plant, told the New York Times: “For us, it was very important to receive the support of the universities. We are impressed by the social conscience of the students of the United States.”

As its epigraph, “Half the Sky” uses the Chinese proverb, “Women hold up half the sky.” Ignoring the world’s oppressed female garment workers from a large fraction of that half is a blunder and a scandal.

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Students Still Teaching Elders about Ethics

“Stop using sweatshop labor!” That’s the rallying cry of a group of students at the University of Houston in their campaign to persuade the school’s administrators to stop doing business with sweatshops that produce sweaters, T-shirts, caps, and other athletic items bearing the University’s logo.

On Monday (3/31) dozens of students will participate in a dramatic protest starting at noon in front of the campus library. It will feature a mock funeral ceremony , complete with a coffin, symbolizing the death of worker rights at UH. A “funeral”procession will follow, wending its way through the campus and ending at the office of President Renu Khator, who just took office two months ago.

One of her first acts was to appoint a committee to study the sweatshop issues that an activist group, the UH Students against Sweatshops, has been raising since June last year. Tim O’Brien, a graduate student in history and head of SAS at UH, sees the committee as “nothing more than a publicity stunt,” and said so in an interview with the Houston Chronicle.

His frustration is that Khator, like her predecessors, is not calling on SAS to help in solving the problem. Her new committee, headed by an economics prof, has six other members, including one student representative, who is not O’Brien or a SAS member.

SAS has the support of the UH student government association, which in January passed a resolution in favor of SAS’ twin goals: that UH join the Worker Rights’ Consortium, an independent monitoring organization, and endorse its Designated Suppliers Program, a plan for a new source system of sweatshop-free factories.

In a March 3 letter to O’Brien, President Rhator, after scolding SAS for an “antagonistic manner,” defended the university’s position as follows:

-- Although not a member of the Worker Rights Consortium, “our current practices embody the same spirit and commitment to worker rights.”
-- Adidas, one of the three largest vendors of apparel at UH, is a member of the Fair Labor Organization (FLA), “an organization created to promote a uniform international labor standard and to improve working conditions worldwide.”
-- The other two UH vendors, Collegiate Licensing Corporation and Barnes & Noble, “have adopted a code of conduct consistent with that of the FLA.”

Pointedly, Rhator mentioned that, as a newcomer, she depended on a cabinet briefing for her knowledge of the UH’s “spirit and commitment to worker rights.” The cabinet’s perspective is predictable. She would be wise to supplement it with a briefing from SAS. So far she has declined to meet with SAS.

“It is absolutely clear,” she writes, “that the University of Houston is committed to fair labor practices.” SAS is not impressed by her assurances about UH’s commitment, however. I can understand why.

How does a university carry out that commitment when the university routinely buys goods from countries where sweatshops thrive? The question is important to anyone proud of the UH logo displayed on those goods. To answer it truthfully, madam, some of your students are very much better informed than your cabinet.

The University of Houston is not the first university to face this crisis. It is not a crisis of “disruptive behavior,” as the university states, but a crisis of conscience. In the late 1990s some of the country’s leading universities – Duke, Georgetown, and the University of Wisconsin – underwent similar crises, and came to understand that their students knew how to make a genuine commitment to worker rights. I urge you and your committee to look into the experience of these “peer institutions” too.

Because of the victories achieved by those campaigns to end university complicity with sweatshops, I wrote in February 1999: “Thank the Lord for the college students, many of them just freshmen and sophomores, who are teaching their elders powerful lessons in global ethics.”

In the past decade, many universities have recognized the wisdom of listening to their students, even to students who have engaged in sit-ins and other disruptive behavior. Later, those universities wondered why they didn’t start listening much earlier. When will the elders of the University of Houston start listening?



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