United Students Against Sweatshops

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

United Students Against Sweatshops.

United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) is a student organization with chapters at over 200 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. In April of 2000, USAS founded the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent monitoring organization that investigates labor conditions in factories that produce collegiate apparel all over the world. The WRC exacts an annual membership fee from participating universities, which is used to fund its monitoring work. The WRC works with NGOs, human rights groups, and local labor unions or federations, in countries where collegiate apparel is produced. At present over 170 universities and colleges have affiliated with the WRC. USAS is also proposing that universities strengthen the WRC's effectiveness by signing on to the Designated Suppliers Program, or DSP, which would act to source collegiate apparel from factories that respect workers' rights to form unions and be paid living wages. As of Fall 2007, 38 colleges have signed on to the DSP.

In 2000, Nike and other major clothing corporations renamed the Apparel Industry Partnership (AIP) the Fair Labor Association (FLA), in large part to compete with the WRC. The AIP, an initiative of the Clinton administration, had become a discredited organization, because all non-profit organizations and unions that had initially supported it, withdrew from it, with the exception of the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF).

United Students Against Sweatshops is widely viewed as the largest anti-sweatshop community group in the United States and Canada. It formed in 1997 as part of a broader anti-sweatshop movement increasingly popular in North America. This movement exhibited a great degree of skepticism of free trade practices, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the proposed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA).

Focusing on domestic as well as international sweatshops, the group has built coalitions of students, labor groups, workers, and community members that focus on a broad range of campaigns:

supporting an anti-sweatshop policy called the DSP, which would source collegiate apparel from factories that respect workers' rights to form unions and be paid living wages
opposing Taco Bell's wages to farm laborers ("Boot the Bell")
protesting sweatshop conditions at New Balance in New York and Forever 21 in San Francisco
living wage campaigns for campus workers and sweatshop workers
organizing anti-sweatshop groups in high schools
protesting Coca-Cola's policy towards union organizers in Colombia
supporting local labor campaigns
increased minimum wage campaigns in several states and localities
protesting against Jessica Matthews, board member of Hanes and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in relation to sweatshop conditions for Hanes workers in the Dominican Republic.^[1]

The group is based on the idea that students and community members should have control over the conditions under which their clothes are manufactured. Because universities license their logo to clothing manufacturers, such as Nike, who then subcontract orders to other companies that further subcontract work to thousands of different factories, the group considers the licensing stage as the most efficient way to control production. USAS also emphasizes working in solidarity with workers in sweatshops or on college campuses by supporting workers organizing themselves for better conditions.

The group has taken as its motto the quote "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together" by the aboriginal Australian activist Lilla Watson.