Stopping Sweatshops by Stripping

The Designated Supplier Program.

By Dan Mauer and Josh Rosenthal, Brandeis University

Students across the country are storming their university presidents’ offices and stripping down, staging hunger strikes and sit-ins, even getting arrested. Why? Because chances are good that the sweatshirt you bought at your school’s bookstore was made in a sweatshop—a factory that pays less than a living wage where workers must withstand oppressive working conditions because they lack the right to organize on their own behalf. For the last several years, the student-run national group United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) has helped lead the fight to fix these factories, and with the new Designated Suppliers Program (DSP), students are pushing their schools to take the next step in fighting this problem.

In the late 1990s, USAS worked with administrators and labor rights experts to form the Worker Rights Consortium, the only independent non-profit group dedicated to monitoring and ameliorating the abuses that occur in sweatshops across the world every day. Since then, student-run campaigns have led 152 colleges and universities to affiliate with the Worker Rights Consortium and the WRC has worked with numerous factories to improve conditions, but along the way, they’ve run into serious implementation problems. Licensees, such as Nike and Champion, constantly shift orders from factory to factory, making monitoring difficult and sustainability next to impossible. To make matters worse, licensees pay factory owners too little per garment for them to treat and pay their workers well. Most licensees choose instead to boost their own profit margins. So, even if your school says that its clothing is “sweat-free,” in reality it probably is not. Students all across the country are working to do something about it.

Working with labor rights experts and workers in factories around the world, USAS developed the Designated Suppliers Program to address the limitations of the WRC. Through the program, licensees will be required to buy increasing percentages of their apparel for DSP-affiliated universities from “Designated Suppliers”—factories that are specifically designated for university apparel. The WRC can then ensure that these factories pay their workers a living wage and collectively bargain with a union or another legitimate representative body. In order to be certified as Designated Suppliers, factories will also have to produce a large percentage of their merchandise for universities or other buyers committed to the same fair labor practices. Additionally, licensees will be required to pay these Designated Suppliers a high enough price per piece to allow the factories to sustain their workers’ living wages and just working conditions.

These new policies will make a huge difference for workers at these factories. Very few workers at apparel factories across the world are unionized, so the requirement that the employees at Designated Suppliers be unionized is a major step forward. Other important features of the DSP program are the fact that DSPs must pay a living wage and the WRC will be able to inspect them. Until now, most gains in working conditions were ephemeral because of the constant shifting of production from factory to factory and frequent labor law violations, but with the DSP in place, those gains can be sustained.

Representatives of the  thirteen schools that have committed to the principles of the program, including Duke University, Cornell University, the University of Connecticut and Georgetown University will be meeting at Georgetown this Friday with student labor activists, to begin working on implementing the program. This meeting is itself an accomplishment, but there is clearly much more to do.

Students at dozens of colleges and universities are fighting to get their schools to support the DSP. Some administrations are receptive to doing the right thing, but all too many are dragging their feet. Actions have been planned to assist arrested students at the University of California, hunger strikers at University of Colorado and more.

If you’re interested in the anti-sweatshop movement, the best way to support it is to get involved on your own campus. Find out if your school has affiliated with the Worker Rights Consortium, learn more about how to advocate for the Designated Supplier Program, and contact USAS to get started.

Related Stories

• Gender-Neutral Housing Comes to Princeton
• Campaign Communications Director, Repower America
• Toke Up Marijuana Laws
• Send a Health Care E-Card
• The Battle for Pittsburgh