The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 13, 1998,  p. A35

Developing Codes of Conduct for Manufacturers of College Apparel

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