SOLE and the cut Russell Contract

Props to SOLE (Students Organizing for Labor and Economic equality), my former student activist group at Michigan for being mentioned in the recent New York Times article about the University of Michigan cutting its contract with Russell Apparel over documented anti-union tactics in its Honduras factory in violation of their code of conduct:

The University of Michigan announced on Monday that it was ending its apparel licensing agreement with the Russell Corporation, becoming the 12th university to do so in response to the company’s decision to close a unionized factory in Honduras.

University of Michigan officials said an agreement under which Russell made T-shirts, sweatshirts and fleeces with university logos would end as of March 31 because Russell had violated the university’s code of conduct calling on licensees to guarantee the basic rights of workers.

...

Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, said, “Over a period of two years, Russell engaged in the systematic abuse of the associational rights of its workers in Honduras, thereby gravely and repeatedly violating the universities’ codes of conduct.”

....

“This is a toxic company,” said Leigh Wedenoja, a University of Michigan senior who is a member of the president’s advisory committee as well as Students Organizing for Labor and Economic Equality. “We feel that if the university is serious about encouraging human rights, then we could not keep Russell as a licensee.”

Unfortunately, such conditions in garment factories across the world sourced by major apparel and clothing companies are the rule rather than the exception and University code of conducts that most major colleges across the US currently have are inadequate. They fail to address the global supply chain in the garment industry that create these sweatshop conditions. As Scott Nova of the WRC explained it in 2006:

While colleges and clothing companies have agreed on such measures, it has
become apparent that they alone won’t work, said Scott Nova, executive director
of the consortium. He said that the problem is that factories in developing
nations are desperate for the work. So if an American clothing company with a
contract to produce thousands of sweatshirts with a college logo seeks bids, the
factories will bid low. Even when that company includes a code of conduct as a
requirement, the factories will claim that they will comply, get the contract
(at prices that would make it next to impossible to comply with the code) and
assume no one will notice. Because the contracts are short-term, he said, even
if someone did notice, the contract would be over soon enough.

"The basic underlying supply chain model of jumping from factory to factory, of pushing prices down, is simply incompatible with a reasonable level of worker rights," said Nova.

As a result, since 2005, students on campuses across the country (including SOLE) have been fighting for the adoption of a systematic, anti-sweatsop measure known as the Designated Supplier Program (DSP) at their universities. The DSP addresses the structural problems of the global apparel market by creating a fair trade model for the factories manufacturing collegiate apparel. Under the program " university licensees are required to source most
university logo apparel from supplier factories that have been determined by universities, through independent verification, to be in compliance with their obligation to respect the rights of their employees." In order to do this, university licensees are required to meet several obligations to their suppliers:

• pay a price to suppliers commensurate with the actual cost of producing under applicable labor standards, including payment of a living wage
• maintain long-term relationships with suppliers;
• ensure that each supplier factory participating in the program receives sufficient orders so that the majority of the factory’s production is for the collegiate
  market

There has been some progress in getting universities to adopt the DSP and get started on implementing it. Atleast 30 colleges including the entire University of California state colleges, the University of Wisconsin. Indiana University, University of Miami and Georgetown University have adopted the DSP. But there has been alot of resistance as well to it at major universities that carry alot of weight in the collegiate apparel market like my alma mater the University of Michigan.

In 2007, after a two year long campaign and the formation of a sweatfree coalition over the DSP, I and 12 other students engaged in a sit-in in the President's office to have our voice heard and get this proposal adopted. Unfortunately instead of talking with us, the President (Mary Sue Coleman) had us arrested. In past achievements towards sweatfree UMich apparel had come through sit-ins such as to get the University adoption of a code of conduct (1999) and its membership in the WRC (2000) . Thus our own effort seemed like a continuation in this struggle. Unfortunately it didn't turn out that way due to a President who readily claimed that she "doesn't take demands from students."

Only when we can address the structural problems of the global apparel industry that create sweatshop conditions, which the DSP is the only measure out there that does, can we end the kind of problems that happened at the Russell factory in Honduras.