This post is by Terasia Bradford, rising junior at the Ohio State University, who just traveled to Texas to confront the Dallas Cowboys’ chief executive for merchandising over the team’s ploy to take over the college apparel industry while ignoring our universities’ anti-sweatshop standards:
A new wave of controversy is brewing over Jerry Jones, the notorious owner of the Dallas Cowboys who’s worth $2 Billion, and his scheme to snatch up monopoly deals for producing and selling college logo apparel.
News surfaced in May that the Cowboys quietly convinced USC to sign a 10-year deal granting the football giant exclusive rights to manufacture and distribute USC-branded apparel, with absolutely no opportunity for discussion of the impact on garment workers nor the many small businesses that depend on supplying USC apparel. Then, we discovered the Cowboys are marketing this type of deal to many large universities, apparently attempting to take total control of the lucrative college apparel business, one school at a time. Right this minute my own school, Ohio State, is considering the Cowboys’ bid for a monopoly deal behind closed doors, with zero of students and faculty at the table who have fought to make Buckeye gear sweat-free.
But Jerry Jones seems to have overlooked one major hurdle: universities require apparel companies to comply with labor codes of conduct, and students have shown we won’t tolerate sweatshop abuse in our ground-breaking victories over Nike and Russell Athletic. Unfortunately for Jones’ dreams of fattening pockets off college sports fans, the Cowboys have an utterly dismal track record on sweatshops so far.
In the case of Ohio State, apparel suppliers are required to follow our labor code of conduct. The code requires, among other things, that the companies pay workers “a living wage at least sufficient to meet employees’ basic needs and provide some discretionary income.”
The Cowboys have no plan to comply with these standards. How do I know? I traveled to Dallas last week to meet personally with Bill Priakos, the COO of Dallas Cowboys Merchandising, along with other USAS leaders. Mr. Priakos could not name a single Cowboys supplier factory that pays a living wage, and he had no plan to change that. Nor could he name a single factory in the Cowboys’ supply chain with a legitimate, independent labor union, calling into question the Cowboys’ compliance with our code’s Freedom of Association requirement.
Instead of discussing plans to address these serious issues, Mr. Priakos insulted students for the “slanderous” tone of the letter USAS activists sent to the Cowboys when we initially raised these concerns. If it makes Cowboys executives uncomfortable and agitated when we point out worker abuse in their supply chain, then they have a simple choice to make: change the way you do business, or stay out of the college apparel market!
The Cowboys have also argued that their own internal monitoring processes have — shocker! — not found any abuses. Obviously, when you’re paying for the investigation, you get what you want to see. This type of self-monitoring has been discredited over and over through a decade of college anti-sweatshop efforts, so this obsolete “fox guarding the hen house” model has no place in a serious discussion of the Cowboys’ compliance with labor standards.
But even if you trusted the Cowboys to judge their own labor practices, let’s just look at the results of that model:
- In May, Cowboys supplier PT Kizone in Indonesia withheld wages owed to 2,800 workers. At first, the Cowboys publicly lied about whether they were sourcing from the factory while workers earned the money they were owed. Most recently, the Worker Rights Consortium reported that the Cowboys “have failed to take any responsibility, leaving $1.8 million still owed to the workers at Kizone,” even as Nike — no anti-sweatshop champion themselves — stepped in to partially pay back the workers. The WRC goes on to call this “de facto wage theft” from some of the poorest garment workers in the world.
- In another recent high-profile sweatshop case, the Global Institute for Labour & Human Rights reported that Cowboys gear was sewn at the Ocean Sky factor in El Salvador, where workers were paid the extreme sub-poverty wage of 8 cents an hour.
That’s just a peak of the Cowboys’ dismal track record. Mr. Priakos and the Cowboys have offered no plan to remedy these violations of our universities’ labor standards. Students will not let Jerry Jones’ notoriously profits-obsessed operation get away with being so utterly unresponsive to severe abuse in their own supply chain.
Back at Dallas Cowboys headquarters in Texas, we made clear to Mr. Priakos that we will not allow Ohio State or any university to sign a contract with this company until they prove they can live up to our schools’ labor standards. And we’re not holding our breath.
Help stop the Dallas Cowboys from taking over the college apparel without any real commitment to workers’ rights! E-mail email hidden; JavaScript is required to get involved.
