Word: garments
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Shedding the garment industry's longstanding image of secrecy and silence, Gear proclaimed earlier this month that it would disclose the locations of its factories by January, in response to heightened concerns about sweatshop labor. Yesterday, Champion said it would do the same...
Last week, two roads diverged for universities interested in ending sweatshops. The national student umbrella group, United Students Against Sweatshops, released the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), an outline of principles for university monitoring of overseas garment factories. The WRC calls for full public disclosure of locations and wage information of all factories producing college clothing. It also mandates the establishment of a small non-profit monitoring body responsible for responding to worker complaints. These principles represent a clear break from those currently held by the government and industry-sponsored Fair Labor Association (FLA), which would rely on classified, corporate audits...
...course, it is beyond Harvard's power to end sweatshops alone. Only in concert with other universities will we be able to exert enough economic pressure on the garment industry to change their practices. As colleges nationwide contemplate anti-sweatshop policies, Harvard can either lead or follow the national movement...
...proposal, assuming that factory locations and information are made public, would then staff a small, independent monitoring organization that responds to complaints rather than tries to inspect every garment factory on the globe. A secret, corporate model such as the FLA, on the other hand, lacking the aid of public scrutiny, would try to do all the monitoring itself...
Even if we believe that for-profit consulting firms with long-term business relationships to garment corporations can deliver objective information, as the present FLA plan stands, each factory would be inspected once every ten years--ten lifetimes in today's economy. And, since inspections are pre-announced, factories owners will rest easy, knowing they can abuse women workers and bust unions for years and still enjoy valuable "sweat-free" certification from the U.S. government--and Harvard...