It’s impossible to walk across campus without seeing a sweatshirt that proudly states “Saint Louis University” across the front, or a T-shirt bearing the grinning face of the Billiken. There’s a good chance that as you read this, you are wearing SLU apparel. If you don’t see anyone in blue and whilte, look around-you must be sitting alone in the bowels of the Lewis Annex.
Almost every one of us has at least one item of SLU clothing. But even though you purchased that Billiken T-shirt here, at our very own campus bookstore, there is no guarantee that blatant human rights abuses were not stitched into those very seams.
Next time you decide to wear your SLU shirt, check the tag. Made in Malaysia? Maybe El Salvador, or even Honduras? Can you be sure that the factory in which it was made pays their workers a fair wage? Respects their basic rights? Allows their workers to collectively express their voice as a union? Well, unfortunately, neither can we-but there is someone who can help us try.
The Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) is a non-profit organization that monitors the conditions of collegiate apparel-producing factories and corporations. United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), an international student-run organization dedicated to improving labor conditions, workers’ rights and ethical manufacturing practices, developed the WRC in 1999. United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) has recently launched the “Sweat-Free Campus Campaign.”
By affiliating with the WRC, we as a university would be better able to ensure that clothing with SLU’s name and emblem was made under conditions aligned not only with basic standards of human dignity, but also with the core values of the Jesuit tradition.
No university seeks out sweatshop labor in order to produce its goods, but it is simply irresponsible if a university doesn’t make an effort to learn how or where those products are produced.
Currently, SLU is aligned with the Fair Labor Association (FLA). Many people believe that this makes affiliating with the WRC arbitrary and pointless. Unfortunately, this assumption is incorrect.
The FLA has a governing board that sets its regulatory guidelines and makes judicial decisions. The board is comprised of 13 seats: Six seats are held by corporations and six more are held by NGOs (non-governmental organizations), leaving only one seat for a university member. With that kind of representation, and the fact that the FLA is funded primarily by corporations, whose interests do you think take precedent?
The FLA has only a general code of conduct that is applied to all participating corporations and factories. Whether or not this code is upheld is indeterminate, as the FLA relies on corporations to monitor their own factories and leaves remediation up the company using the facility in violation. Even then, the FLA requires that only 10 percent of a company’s factories be monitored each year.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) says that the manner in which the FLA chooses both the plants to be monitored and those doing the monitoring would be unacceptable for any company in the United States So why should we find those practices to be acceptable in U.S.-based companies abroad?
The WRC, however, takes a more grass-roots approach to rectify labor abuses. Starting by investigating individual worker complaints, the WRC works its way up through a corporate system instead of dealing solely with those in power.
The WRC also implements a code of conduct and a monitoring process in the factories its members use. However, the WRC’s code of conduct and monitoring procedures differ from the FLA’s in a few distinguished ways. First, no general code of conduct is used across the board. Universities work with the WRC to create their own codes of conduct. These individualized codes are then applied to the factories and suppliers that each university individually buses.
Additionally, the WRC believes in promoting a living wage-a wage substantial enough to provide for the basic necessities of life, dependent on price rates of the given region-and works with monitors independent of the apparel industry. It also helps corporations establish a plan of action to correct violations.
The most notable and meaningful difference is the fact that corporations themselves cannot be part of the WRC governing board. This way, laborers, universities and other WRC affiliates are not gagged by powerful corporate moguls such as Nike, Adidas and the like. This independence from corporate governance and funding allows the WRC freedom to gather information about workers’ rights abuses from the very source: workers and worker advocates.
As of Nov. 20, 164 colleges and universities have affiliated with the WRC, including 15 of the 27 Jesuit universities across the nation, including Fordham, Loyola University of Chicago, Marquette and Georgetown. And it’s not just the Jesuits who are following the fair labor example; DePaul, Harvard, Washington University, Notre Dame, Ohio State University and Cornell (just to name a few) are among the 164 already affiliated schools. Now it’s our turn.
SLU’s chapter of USAS has started a petition in support of affiliation. To date, it has garnered 948 individual signatures from SLU students, faculty and staff. In addition, SLUUSAS has given educational presentations to on-campus student groups and asked them to vote on whether or not they endorse affiliating with the WRC. So far, more than eight student groups, including HALO, Otro Mar and APO have shown their support by signing the group petition.
Don’t get me wrong-our university in no way advocates for sweatshop-manufactured clothing. Yet we cannot, in good faith, claim that our apparel is “sweat-free.” It may seem like an impossible task: guaranteeing that anything emblazoned with our school’s name is made in a safe factory that follows fair labor codes. Granted, it would be an impossible feat to personally inspect every corporation and manufacturing facility. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything at all. Our system should reflect our interests as a university and the protection of laborers around the world, not of corporate self-interest and greed.
We often discuss the “big” social justice issues. But that’s just it-we talk. Now we have the opportunity and the power to do something. It’s an attainable goal that will make all the difference. We, as the student body, are the ones who must make that difference.
If you have not signed the petition and would like to, or are involved in a student group that might be interested in hearing SLUUSAS’s presentation, you can contact a coordinating member through the SLUUSAS Facebook group or come to a regularly scheduled meeting on Mondays at 7:00 p.m. on the 2nd floor of Ritter Hall. In addition, on Tuesday, Dec. 5 at 8:00 p.m., SLUUSAS will be hosting a rally and photo shoot in the St. Louis Room of the BSC. (If learning about sweatshops isn’t incentive enough, free doughnuts will be provided!)

Moira Gardner is a freshman in the School of Social Work.