Word: fla
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...theatergoer in Princeton, N.J., buttonholed an usher during the intermission of the play Anna in the Tropics a few weeks ago. Her complaint: too much cigar smoking onstage. The usher patiently explained that the play is, after all, set in a cigar factory--a family-owned plant in Tampa, Fla., in 1929, where the Cuban-American workers have just hired a new "lector" to read novels to them while they work. Cigar smoke, however, is only one of the sweet and strange aromas that waft from Anna in the Tropics. Written in the lyrical, somewhat formalized language of a folktale...
...instead of joining the WRC, Harvard has been content with membership in a far more lenient, industry-run group. The Fair Labor Association (FLA) is notorious for doing as little as possible. Created by the Apparel Industry Partnership four years ago, the FLA did not issue a public report until June of this year—and when it did so, it refused to release the names or locations of factories, shielding offending factories from any public scrutiny and rendering the reports themselves impossible to verify. Further, the FLA has no provision in its code of conduct against sexual harassment...
...brief look at the composition of their advisory boards speaks to the difference between these groups: representatives of the very clothing companies the FLA supposedly monitors make up one third of its own executive committee; the WRC governing board, in contrast, is made up of labor experts, students and administrators. As a result, the WRC investigations are conducted and decisions about follow-up mediation are made independently of the brands involved. The FLA relies on the same corporations it’s supposed to monitor for much of its funding—seven out of the 11 monitors...
With little to no external monitoring, the FLA keeps many of its reports secret and allows corporate board members to block actions. And despite its “reform” efforts, the FLA still lags in doing its job of responding to corporate violations of workers’ rights. From the New Era cap factory in Buffalo, N.Y., to Land’s End’s Primo factory in El Salvador, the WRC investigated charges of union-busting and discrimination and WRC-affiliated universities threatened to suspend their licenses if companies failed to comply with codes of conduct?...
...been consistently more responsive, more proactive and more effective than the FLA, why is Harvard—purportedly rather enlightened in labor matters—so slow to catch on? Why are we behind the 116 colleges and universities that have already affiliated with the WRC (among them comparable schools such as Columbia, Georgetown and Cornell...