Word: wrc
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Founded and governed by school administrators, labor experts and students, the WRC was created in response to public concern with sweatshop conditions and schools’ increasing complicity in them. The WRC monitors factories that produce clothing licensed by (bearing the logos of) its member schools. If factory conditions are in violation of those schools’ codes of conduct for apparel production, the WRC releases information about the violation publicly and seeks to mediate the dispute with the factory management and the licensed brand. The WRC has investigated every worker complaint it has received (it receives complaints from...
...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...
...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—and the companies ended up complying. The FLA, when it took a public stance, did so only after the WRC had acted...
...WRC has 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...