Students Want to Make Justice Fashionable for Garment Workers

by James Parks, Feb 22, 2007

You see their handiwork on the backs of fashionable people all over the United States and Europe. But what you don’t see are the sweatshops in developing countries where workers toil long hours for little or nothing to produce that new jacket or overpriced pair of jeans.

But a growing coalition of student activists, community groups, unions and people of conscience are taking up the cause of those workers and demanding respect, along with decent wages and working conditions, from the companies that profit from their labor. They also are demanding that these companies, many of them headquartered in this country, use their power to enforce standards of conduct among subcontractors that violate workers’ rights.

Earlier this month, activists from United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) took their case for justice for Jones Apparel Group (JAG) workers in Kenya and Guatemala to the company’s headquarters in Bristol, Pa. JAG makes familiar brand names such as Jones New York, Easy Spirit, Nine West, GLO Jeans, Evan Picone, Gloria Vanderbilt, Tommy Hilfiger, Anne Klein, Ralph Lauren-Polo Jeans and about 14 others.

Union leaders, including Thomas Bates, president of the Bucks County Trade Federation and Industrial Council in Bristol, joined the USAS members as they met with the company’s chief counsel and human resources executive vice president.

The labor-student-community delegation, sharing information gathered by a USAS student activist in Kenya last summer, told the Jones officials about 1,200 factory workers at the Rising Sun factory in the Athi River Export Processing Zone (EPZ) in Kenya, which produced garments for Steve and Barry’s University Sportswear and JAG.

According to information documented and verified by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), in January 2003, workers from Kenya’s export zone factories led a series of wildcat strikes that resulted in an agreement enabling workers to freely join a union and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement covering eight factories. The agreement gave workers a pay increase and included strict provisions against assault, sexual harassment and abuse. The WRC is an independent labor rights monitoring organization supported by more than 150 college and university affiliates

The agreement expired in October 2005, and employers since have refused to renegotiate terms of the contract. Workers now are paid the minimum wage, which is far below a living wage.

Last June, Rising Sun fired all its union workers after they walked out to protest a production manager who assaulted an employee by using degrading language and throwing garments at her, according to the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, which is helping garment workers in Kenya and Guatemala gain a voice in the workplace. The workers were illegally locked out without receiving their severance for almost five months, according to a USAS fact sheet used to educate members of the student-labor-community group.

Rather than fulfill their legal obligation to pay the workers, JAG and its subcontractor shut down the plant.  The 1,200 workers are owed more than $540,000. 

In Guatemala, 22 employees trying to form a union in a plant making Jones apparel lost their jobs in October and have not been reinstated, despite repeated allegations of violations of JAG’s code of conduct by organizations such as USAS, the Worker Rights Consortium and the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation.

USAS members urged JAG officials to reopen the Kenya factory and pay severance to any of the 1,200 unemployed workers who do not return to the factory. They also want Jones to force the Guatemala factory to rehire the union workers.

You can take action to help the JAG workers. Click here to write a letter to company officials demanding that they rehire the fired workers.

Ironically, Jones’s website lists standards for contractors, including:

• They must follow local overtime laws, provide a rest day and not use child labor.
• Workers must be allowed to “join organizations of their own choice” without fear.

The issue of sweatshop labor also is getting attention on Capitol Hill.  Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) is sponsoring the Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act (S. 367), along with Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

The bill would bar imports from sweatshops, and it would give U.S. retailers the right to sue competitors if they are obtaining merchandise from foreign plants that flout their own country’s labor laws.

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