It wasn’t enough for Heather Dell, a cultural anthropologist from the University of Illinois at Springfield, to teach her students about economic inequality around the world.
Dell helped her “What is Power?” class form a United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) chapter this spring. She brought students with her to Nicaragua during spring break to tour a clothing factory. Most recently, she helped the new group and UIS’s administration create a code of conduct for businesses that have a license to produce UIS merchandise. The code requires that factories making UIS apparel pay their workers living wages and overtime, create safe working conditions, do not employ children younger than 14, protect women’s rights, and forbid union busting.
UIS’s administration responded much more enthusiastically than other university administrations are known to, Dell says. Groups such as USAS are more likely to stage protests and rallies than join with administration officials to announce such codes, as UIS did this past Tuesday.
“Some university administrators have refused to deal with the issue of whether university apparel is made under unfair conditions,” Dell says. “They have refused to speak with students.” Dell said UIS’s new chancellor, Richard Ringeisen, opened the door to discussions earlier this year when he said he agreed with student concerns “in spirit” and was familiar with sweatshop issues.
Having a code of conduct allows UIS to join the Worker Rights Consortium, a non-profit organization that includes university administrations, students, and labor rights groups. About 100 other universities and colleges are WRC members.
The trip to Nicaragua was the first time Dell and her students had been to a sweatshop. In this case, it was a Mil Colores factory that produces clothing for Kmart, J.C. Penney, Marshall Fields, and other retailers. Dell said the factory had no air conditioning and inside temperatures were between 90 and 100 degrees. No more than two bathrooms were available for about 700 to 900 employees, who earn $2 dollars a day and spend half of it to pay for the bus rides to and from work. Other reports mention that Mil Colores sometimes pays its employees with used pants. The free trade zone within which the factory operates is surrounded by barbed-wire fences and armed guards, Dell says. A USAS delegation from Duke University that visited the sweatshop mentioned similar findings but added that the factory is “considered the best in the free trade zone.” Recently it has made progress by negotiating with unions.
A committee of three students, a faculty member, and a UIS administration official was created to enforce the code. Dell says it will probably meet once or twice a semester to check whether UIS merchandise comes from factories that pop up on a list regularly updated by WRC.
As for current UIS merchandise, Dell says she doesn’t know of any that violates
the new code. “We don’t know yet,” she says. “We need to investigate.”
This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2003.
