The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 13, 1998, p. A35
Institutions try to insure that clothes carrying their names are not made by 'sweatshop' labor
By JULIE L. NICKLIN
Colleges and universities are taking steps to avoid the clothing crisis that hit Kathie
Lee Gifford two years ago.
In 1996, a human-rights group disclosed that a line of clothes designed under Ms.
Gifford's label was being produced by 13-year-olds working for "starvation
wages" in a Honduras factory.
Now colleges are coming up with policies to insure that the T-shirts, sweatshirts, caps,
and other clothes that carry their names are not being manufactured by
"sweatshop" labor.
Each year, many colleges make hundreds of thousands -- even millions -- of dollars on the
sale of such items under licensing deals with apparel giants such as Champion, GEAR for
Sports, and Russell Athletic. Typically, the clothing is made in factories outside the
United States, where labor is cheaper.
The colleges' policies seek to set acceptable standards for those factories, in terms of
their safety conditions and the workers' ages, wages, hours, and treatment.
Colleges are finding, however, that it's difficult to enforce their ideals in places such
as Honduras and the Dominican Republic, which are so far removed from the campuses. It's
hard not only to judge what working conditions are acceptable in another country, but to
monitor compliance with the policies. And often, it's almost impossible to identify which
overseas factories are working for what companies.
What's more, the whole issue goes beyond universities. Celebrities, designers, sports
teams, the federal government, the retail industry, and even the U.S. textile
manufacturers themselves are developing policies for foreign subcontractors to live by. It
has reached the point that some textile manufacturers, however, are saying enough is
enough.
That means the universities, which make up only a $2.5-billion slice of a total
sports-licensing market estimated by some to be worth as much as $15-billion, are walking
a fine line. They say they cannot come up with so many different policies or such rigid
ones that they alienate the clothing manufacturers and lose lucrative licensing deals.
But they have to make sure the codes are tough enough -- and enforceable enough -- to
satisfy human-rights groups and student activists who say the codes will be useless if
they do not reveal the names of the factories that are used.
"It's easy to come up with a code that is window dressing for the American
public," says Tico Almeida, a Duke University senior and founder of a campus group
called Students Against Sweatshops. "There is no credibility in a system of
monitoring that does not allow transparency."
Officials at the University of Notre Dame, the first higher-education institution in the
United States to adopt a code of conduct for its licensees, agree that a policy has no
teeth unless it can be enforced.
The university in fall 1996 adopted its three-page code, which, among other things,
requires that factory workers be at least 14 years old, paid at least the local minimum
wage, and not be required to work more than 60 hours a week. Officials say that the policy
is written into the contracts the university has with all of its 400 licensees -- the
companies that manufacture apparel with the Notre Dame name or logo -- and that all have
assured Notre Dame officials that their subcontractors are abiding by the terms.
However, last year, the university learned from an outside source -- officials would not
be specific about the details -- that one of its licensees might be subcontracting to a
factory where abusive conditions existed. University licensing officers sent a letter to
each of the 400 licensees, asking if any held contracts with the factory in question.
Three replied that the factory had produced clothing for them in the past. A fourth said
it currently was having clothes made in the factory, but had seen no evidence of the
alleged violations.
Notre Dame told the company to stop contracting with the factory in question, and
university officials then took the company at its word that the matter would be addressed.
Notre Dame officials, however, are no longer willing simply to have faith that the
companies are telling the truth, says William P. Hoye, associate vice-president and
counsel for the Roman Catholic institution.
Officials there are now discussing recruiting professors who are knowledgeable about
particular regions or labor issues, and sending them to inspect the factories. Mr. Hoye
acknowledges that it would be a massive -- and expensive -- undertaking, but one that
Notre Dame wants to attempt.
"I don't suggest that we're going to bang down the factory doors at night, but we'd
do reasonable, responsible inspections," says Mr. Hoye. "I think it's morally
right and consistent with Notre Dame's mission."
Steve Jesseph, executive director for global workplace values and safety for the Sara Lee
Corporation, which owns Champion Jogbra, defends the textile industry, saying that most
U.S. companies, including his, have policies that forbid their subcontractors from
mistreating workers, and that compliance is monitored.
Mr. Jesseph also cautions that foreign factories should not be judged according to
American sensibilities about what constitutes a safe, humane workplace. "Sweatshop
conditions? No. Not in full compliance with our conditions? Yes."
While some colleges do not believe that a crusade against abusive factories is part of
their missions, Brown and Duke Universities have each adopted a code of conduct for
licensees within the past eight months.
Officials at Brown say they largely modeled their three-page code, adopted in April, on
the code at Notre Dame, and another at Duke, which was approved in March. The policies at
Brown and Duke require that employees be at least 15 years of age (or 14 in countries
where that is the legal employment age), that a level of wages be paid that is
"essential to meeting employees' basic needs," and that no employee can be
"subject to any physical, sexual, psychological, or verbal harassment or abuse."
Around the time that Brown was adopting its policy, the university was visited by a group
that was touring U.S. campuses to reveal poor working conditions in foreign factories. A
19-year-old woman from the Dominican Republic, who said she worked in a factory under
contract with a particular company to make caps for American colleges, told students and
officials how the workers there were paid poverty-level wages, and had no clean drinking
water.
But Larry Carr, Brown's director of bookstore and services, says that the company in
question denied using that factory. Since then, the university has received assurances
from all of its 100 licensees that their foreign subcontractors will adhere to Brown's
code.
Since last spring, Duke has been working with 13 other universities to develop a code for
the Collegiate Licensing Company, an Atlanta-based business that represents about 160
colleges in licensing deals. "The only way to manage this in a way that is practical
and workable for licensees is to come up with a uniform policy," says Bruce B.
Siegal, vice-president and general counsel for the licensing company.
The Association of Collegiate Licensing Administrators agrees, and has been trying to come
up with a uniform code for its approximately 300 members. Both groups are trying to
develop a system of monitoring.
Representatives of both the administrators' group and the company say that getting large
numbers of universities to agree to a common code is no easy task. Some officials complain
that their colleagues are trying to use the codes to cure the ills of the world.
Others say it is difficult to judge what is acceptable in another country. Many officials,
for example, disagree on what should be considered a "livable wage."
Some officials want the codes to generally say workers need to be paid at least the
minimum wage allowed by local law, says Rick Van Brimmer, immediate past president of the
licensing association, and assistant director for trademark and licensing services at Ohio
State University. But what if local law allows wages to be so low that a person has to
work "three days for a gallon of milk?" he asks. "That may meet local law,
but it wouldn't be livable."
Other officials caution that if they make their codes too rigid and specific, the bigger
companies might simply stop using certain factories. That would mean the workers could
then lose their jobs -- and low wages are better than none at all. "To come to
consensus is extremely difficult business," says Mr. Van Brimmer.
There's a strong indication, however, that once the colleges do reach consensus, student
activists won't be satisfied.
A national student group called United Students Against Sweatshops is urging members to
push their universities to force the U.S. companies to disclose the names of all foreign
factories they use to make clothing for colleges. "We're telling people that if the
policy doesn't have disclosure, then it's a cover-up," says Mr. Almeida, the Duke
student who founded the university's chapter of the national organization.
Mr. Almeida and other members are frustrated that it's unclear just which factories are
producing university clothing. To try to learn more about the foreign factories, Mr.
Almeida and seven other students from seven other institutions traveled this past summer
to El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Their trip was supported in part by the National
Labor Committee, the New York-based human-rights organization that disclosed the
conditions of factories producing Ms. Gifford's line of clothing.
The students did not learn from their trip which factories were producing university
merchandise. However, Mr. Almeida and the others say that deplorable conditions existed in
nearly all of the factories they visited.
Mr. Almeida explains that, typically, a number of factories operate within a single, huge,
fortified complex. "It looks like a prison, surrounded by a 10- to 15-foot-high wall
-- brick or stone -- with barbed wire on top," he says. "Several men with
machine guns stand at the gates or the doors."
"It's very obvious that the companies inside don't want people to know what's going
on in there. And the message it sends to workers is that it's a different world in there,
and you can't tell anyone."
Nevertheless, Mr. Almeida and the other students, over seven days, interviewed 200 or 300
workers outside the factories. Some workers, he says, reported being forced to work
unreasonable amounts of overtime. Others had been fired for trying to organize a union.
Mr. Almeida says he applauds Duke's efforts to develop a code. But he thinks the
university needs to call for public disclosure of the factories' identities. Duke requires
the companies to provide university officials with the names and locations of the
factories that produce the institution's clothing. Duke officials, however, have promised
to keep that information confidential.
Mr. Almeida argues that if the factories were disclosed to the public, then human-rights
groups could easily monitor what is happening in those places, and could report
infractions to the colleges. In effect, he says, colleges would get the benefit of an
outside monitoring system, at no cost to them.
Jim Wilkerson, Duke's director of stores operations and trademark licensing, says the
university officials' hands are tied on that point, because the U.S. companies would never
agree to full public disclosure.
The companies, he says, feel that "providing a shopping list of their factories to
the public and to their competitors," would damage "their competitive edge.
"I don't know if I buy that argument, but we're okay with it," he says, as long
as Duke has an effective code. Students will just have to trust that Duke's monitoring
system, once it is in place, will be diligent, Mr. Wilkerson says. "We're not going
to compromise the integrity of the code."
The textile companies, meanwhile, argue that although they are trying to work with the
colleges, the industry is growing weary of all the codes that are being tossed around.
"A number of codes are in conflict with each other," says Mr. Jesseph, of Sara
Lee, which owns Champion. The codes being developed by colleges and other groups, he
explains, often do not address issues such as discrimination in the same way.
Mr. Jesseph suggests that the colleges and other groups accept a code that was developed,
and in September approved, by the American Apparel Manufacturers Association. He says the
code could represent the values of many types of organizations and institutions. The
one-page code, although shorter and more generally worded than those of the colleges,
requires that factories "comply with laws and regulations in all locations where they
conduct business," and that they "provide at least one day off in every
seven-day period, except as required to meet urgent business needs."
Mr. Jesseph says that even though it is a policy developed by his industry, it is not a
case of the "fox watching the henhouse." The apparel-manufacturers' association,
he says, would use major accounting firms and consultants -- who would be objective -- to
monitor compliance.
If the colleges come up with too many different codes, he says, they may hurt themselves.
Mr. Jesseph says that, although his company doesn't feel this way, someone from another
company recently told him, "If the colleges want us to sign that code, we'll walk.
It's not a big enough piece of our business for us to get wrapped up in."
Copyright © 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher Education