By Jillian Stampher

As of Friday, May 11, 2012

A large blue check for $1.8 million sits in UW President Michael Young’s office after being presented by members of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) on Friday afternoon.

The check, signed by members of the UW community, was meant to remind Young to present a letter of final notice to the adidas Group, with which the university has an apparel contract. The $1.8 million refers to the money adidas allegedly owes its workers in Indonesia, after their severance. This would be a violation of the UW’s code of conduct.

The UW is not alone in facing these student demands — Georgetown University is investigating labor violations and the University of Wisconsin ended its contract with adidas due to the alleged violations in February of this year.

Earlier this year USAS demanded Young end the contract with the company. To reiterate this, the group sent a letter to the president with its demands. Janis Marks, Young’s scheduler, said he received their letter but she doesn’t know his current status on the response. Young was not in his office during the presentation of the check.

“It’s in the works and that’s rather broad and I don’t know enough to get any more narrowed in on that,” Marks said.

USAS member Grace Flott said the group did not expect to speak directly with Young, but members are hoping for a quick response.

“He’s already been given this recommendation and we hope that having that check in front of him will just serve as a reminder that the student body is really upset about the situation with Adidas,” Flott said. “We hope that he will take that consideration seriously and put him on notice by the end of the week.”

Reach reporter Jillian Stampher at email hidden; JavaScript is required. Twitter: @JillianStampher

Want to end sweatshop abuse and help build worker power in the global economy? Join USAS’s Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns Committee!

Our universities’ money is flowing in and out of places that you wouldn’t think a university would care to do business including the hospitality industry. HEI Hotels is a hotel operator whose investments come from university endowments-  and we’re talking major endowments such as those at some of the most elite universities including Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. While HEI may not be a familiar acronym, HEI’s hotel names such as the Sheraton or Hilton might ring a few bells. The Embassy Suites Irvine, Hilton Long Beach, Sheraton Crystal City, and Le Meridien San Francisco are just some of the hotels operated by HEI through university endowment money. These are the same hotels where workers have gotten fired for eating a guest’s leftover apple or being vocally supportive of unionizing. The average hourly wage for a housekeeper at the Embassy Suites Irvine is $9.74 per hour, and $9.75 at the Hilton Long Beach. If the fact that our universties’ money is tied to union busting hotels paying their workers poverty wages isn’t a surprise to you, then just know that students across the nation have been downright outraged at their adminstration’s complete apathy and inaction at addressing the issue and have been putting on the pressure to stop their universities from investing in HEI.

On February 16, 2011, Brown University became the first school to commit to not reinvest in HEI after a series of protests by the USAS affiliate, Student Labor Alliance (SLA). Soon after in March, the USAS affiliate at UPenn pressured their administration into making a similar commitment. In the Fall of 2011, Yale put out their statement…then Vanderbilt in the new year…then Princeton in March…then Dartmouth. On March 31, 2012, Harvard University notified students in the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) that they were making themselves the latest addition to the growing list of schools saying “no” to HEI. As students campaigned to get these commitments out of their administrators, fired workers at HEI hotels have gotten disciplinary notices removed, their wages paid back to them after wrongful firings, and a movement for hotel worker union power has been strengthened through the support of unlikely leverage holders: students.

Student and workers took action together holding pickets outside hotels, protests on campus, and even coming together to disrupt HEI’s annual investor meeting. With student pressure building nationwide over nearly 3 years, students to this day take full advantage as they continue their fight to stop investments in HEI and continue to win on their campuses, sometimes much sooner than they thought. Nathan Gusdorf is a student who helped run the HEI campaign at Dartmouth that picked up momentum after he and a number of other Dartmouth students attended the USAS National Conference. Dartmouth’s win came just three months after students broached the issue with their adminstration and after a few student actions that made it clear that Dartmouth students were not alone in this fight. ”They knew there was a lot of pressure that had been building nationally and that we were mobilizing students locally,” said Nathan, “Rather than take the flack they decided to preempt a larger campaign and disinvest”. Fellow student organizer Janet Kim spoke to The Dartmouth just days after their victory.“It’s a big win for us,” says Janet Kim. “It took Princeton three years of campaigning to successfully get their school to disinvest, and we only took three months and applied only a couple of pressure points.”

The campaign against HEI to put an end to their sweatshop hotels continues today. Schools like Swarthmore College and Cornell, both top colleges that do not have known investment ties to HEI, have been pressured by students to make statements that they would not consider investing in HEI in the future. While HEI may not be a household name, consider it just one of the many corporations that’s gaining unfavorable fame on college campuses for dragging our instiutions’ names and reputations into their scandalous worker rights controversies. Just like Sodexo, Aramark, Compass, UNICCO, Allied Barton, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Chik-fil-A, Starbucks…(the list goes on), HEI is just one more corporation students have set their campaigns sights on, and saying no more. We will continue to campaign alongside workers and stay nationally coordinated as a student network to keep these corporations from getting away with a race to the bottom using our university money. It is only through the coordination with students and solidarity with labor that we will be able to ensure a check on wealthy corporations and a better living for all members of our community.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 On Day of Adidas AGM, US, Europe Anti-Sweatshop Advocates Demand $1.8M Owed Indonesian Workers

 Teresa Cheng, International Campaigns Coordinator, United Students Against Sweatshops, email hidden; JavaScript is required, 925-330-4449

Lars Stubbe, Urgent Appeals Coordinator, Clean Clothes Campaign Germany, email hidden; JavaScript is required, +49 (0)30 42 08 202-52

THURSDAY, MAY 10 –  Today, as adidas-Group shareholders gather for adidas’s Annual General Meeting in Fuerth, Germany, the two leading anti-sweatshop groups of North America and Europe publicly urge the company to pay the $1.8 million unlawfully withheld from 2,800 workers at its supplier factory in Indonesia. Despite posting first quarter net profits of $375 million and facing pressure from U.S. universities demanding Indonesian workers. adidas’s top three executives earned a total compensation of $14.5 million in FY 2011, more than six times the sum owed to the 2,800 Indonesian workers. United Students Against Sweatshops, the largest student campaign organization in the U.S., has joined with the Clean Clothes Campaign, a European alliance of organizations advocating better working conditions for garment workers, to ensure adidas’s shareholders address the dire conditions facing the company’s Indonesian workers at their Annual General Meeting today.

2,800 workers from the now-shuttered PT Kizone factory, a disclosed adidas supplier until January 2011, sewed adidas apparel for $0.60 an hour, and were left without their $3.3 million in legally-owed severance pay when the factory closed in April last year, according to the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent labor rights watchdog organization. While the other companies that placed orders in the factory have paid a portion of the severance, Adidas is the only major buyer that has refused to contribute a penny, creating a crisis for former PT Kizone workers who have had to withdraw their children from school, are barely able to afford two meals a day for their families, and are mired deeper and deeper into debt.

Renowned U.S. universities have demanded that adidas end the crisis for former PT Kizone workers., including the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan, where adidas provides uniforms and sports equipment for university athletes as part of a $60 million contract. Instead of agreeing to abide by these universities’ labor codes of conduct, adidas has flown to campuses across the country defending its stance. At the University of Wisconsin, the company has even threatened to take legal action against the University should the school sever their sponsorship agreement with adidas in response to the company’s refusal to comply with the University’s labor standards.

Facing mounting criticism from universities with lucrative apparel licensing contracts with adidas, the company’s position has shifted from entirely shirking responsibility to notifying Universities they may potentially offer some workers food vouchers, which universities and students critique as inadequate and distracting.

“adidas’s sweatshop abuse is outrageous,” said Teresa Cheng, International Campaigns Coordinator of United Students Against Sweatshops. “adidas’s refusal to pay PT Kizone workers conforms with their shameful track record of abandoning its Indonesian workers, after years of their hard work in helping adidas make record profits.”

“As a sponsor of the Olympic Games adidas is becoming untrustworthy due to its reaction in this case”, said Lars Stubbe, Urgent Appeals coordinator of the Clean Clothes Campaign Germany. “A company that publicly supports the Olympic ideals of fairness and respect should not systematically violate workers’ rights.”

adidas’s track record is dismal: over 10,000 workers from other closed adidas supplier factories, including at PT Spotec and PT Dong Joe, were never paid the severance they were owed, and six years later, the company has failed to ensure that a majority of them are rehired. adidas has also been under fire this week for failing to address extensive workers’ rights violations in Olympic production sites, see: http://www.playfair2012.org.uk/2012/05/fair-games-human-rights-of-workers-in-olympic-2012-supplier-factories/#more-2521

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United Students Against Sweatshops petitions Martin for workers’ rights

By Rachel Warren
Staff Writer
Published: Friday, May 4, 2012

United Students Against Sweatshops protests LSU’s affiliation with Nike and its tie to sweatshops May 3 near Memorial Tower.Click here to purchase Reveille photos.

Members of United Students Against Sweatshops met with signs in hand to deliver a letter signed by about 90 students to Chancellor Michael Martin.

The letter asks Martin to unite with workers’ rights groups and discusses Nike’s work practices.

Katy Bradley, anthropology senior and USAS member, said the group wanted to make one last effort to raise awareness on campus before the semester ends.

“We like sports and we like student pride,” Bradley said. “We just want LSU to be a responsible consumer.”

Bradley said the group has had a similar protest before, but only two students attended and the letter was ignored.

“We’re hoping with more student support, we’ll make things happen,” she said.

Bradley said the issue was supposed to be brought before the Student Senate but has been put off because the group doesn’t have enough student support.

The group was just granted official organization status from Student Life this semester.

USAS member and music senior Brian Bell said the group recently gained several new members, and he hopes it will continue to grow in the years to come.

“The best thing anyone can do to help this organization is just to join it,” Bell said. “It’s the right thing to do.“

Bradley said if Thursday’s effort is still unsuccessful, the group will continue to approach the chancellor’s office with the topic.

“We can afford for these items to not come from sweatshops,” Bradley said. “And it’s the right thing to do. We want to show that we value the people working to make these clothes.”

Ernie Ballard, director of University Relations, said in an e-mail Martin had no comment on the letter at press time.

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 Want to end sweatshop abuse and help build power for workers in the global economy? Join USAS’s Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns Committee!

By Lauren Tubbs
Wednesday, May 2, 2012 6:22 p.m.
Updated Thursday, May 3, 2012 1:27:40 a.m.

Holding signs reading “Badgers against Adidas” and “People Over Profit,” students marched up Bascom Hill Wednesday in an effort to pressure the chancellor to cut the University ofWisconsin’s contract with Adidas, the brand contracted to manufacture some of UW’s athletic apparel.

>Organized by the Student Labor Action Coalition, participants in the rally marched to interim Chancellor David Ward’s office, where they proceeded to place what they called a “Report Card” made out of poster board on the office door.

The poster board read “Report Card: Labor Rights – F, Transparency – F, Stalling – A+, Overall Performance – Needs Improvement.” Students also chanted “What’s outrageous? Sweatshop wages!”

Tina Treviño-Murphy, a spokesperson for SLAC, said the purpose was to get Chancellor Ward to see how upset students are that he has not listened to their demands.

“It is now the end of the semester, and the Chancellor hasn’t done anything,” Treviño-Murphy said. “We want to show him that this is something important to the students … Overall, we are trying to get him to hold Adidas accountable for their actions.”

UW spokesperson John Lucas said mediation sessions are due to take place on the west coast in June. He added UW has been working hard to address the issues and believes the process is the most likely route to see compensation reach the workers.

In mid-April, Ward said the mediation process was moving slower than preferred, but there has been progress. Lucas added UW is contractually obligated to enter into mediation due to the sponsorship agreement with Adidas.

“The input and participation of students, [Labor Licensing Policy Committee] members and campus governance has been sought at every turn, and Chancellor Ward has made the decision that this is the correct route to take at this time,” Lucas said.

Lydia Zepeda, UW professor of consumer science and the LLPC chair, said the LLPC has urged Ward three times to put Adidas on notice that their actions are taken seriously and that the contract can be cut due to the violations.

She added she remains hopeful that action will be taken because of students’ activism.

“The Chancellor seems to be afraid that Adidas will sue us if we break the contract,” Zepeda stated. “We want to go up there and let him know that he should not be afraid.”

Zepeda said UW has a Collegiate Apparel Code of Conduct that Adidas signed and agreed to when the contract for producing UW apparel was made, showing Adidas assured UW the workers would be paid their wages and benefits.

Ward recently sent the issue to mediation, where the contract with Adidas could be ended due to violation of the terms. Treviño-Murphy said the problem with the mediation is how long it takes and that it is not open to student input.

Treviño-Murphy said another issue with the mediation is the Chancellor has put it off until the summer months, when a majority of students will not be on campus to make their opinions known.

Want to end sweatshop abuse and help build power for workers in the global economy? Join USAS’s Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns Committee!

Students with Occupy Vanderbilt stand with campus workers as they invite President Zeppos to dine with them and get a real and honest view into the struggles of campus dining hall workers. They have to cook and clean for their families and hold down a job but what happens when school is out? This May Day, follow the lead of students and workers atVanderbilt and find out what International Workers’ Day means for your campus workers in 2012. This article was originally published in the Nashville City Paper.

Some of Vanderbilt’s lowest-paid workers seek year-round employment

Most workdays, Jackie Lucas wakes up around 3:30 a.m. She lays out clothes for two children, prepares medications for a husband battling severe artery complications, and arrives at the nearest bus stop to her modest Nolensville Road-area home by 5 a.m.

The family’s primary breadwinner, Lucas then crosses town and makes her way to Vanderbilt University, the elite academic institution where she spends the day.

Lucas is one of Vanderbilt’s some 200 dining staff employees, largely women and minorities, who feed the college kids as they stroll into Rand Hall between classes. College meals can seem like fine dining these days, with pork stroganoff, salmon fillets and rotisserie chicken among the staples.

It’s hard work, but Lucas loves cooking for the kids.

“There’s nothing more satisfying than putting together a good meal and for someone to say, ‘Ms. Jackie, this is so good,’ ” Lucas said.

But even though Lucas wears a white apron with the Vanderbilt crest and a nametag that says she’s a university employee, she feels like a second-class citizen on the 330-acre campus. And with Vanderbilt’s May 11 commencement day just around the corner, that feeling is about to hit home.

Following the upcoming exodus of students for summer break, the majority of Vanderbilt dining workers won’t have a job for the next three-plus months until class reconvenes in the fall. Dining workers call it a mass layoff. Only a few dozen employees, most on a part-term basis, are retained for the school’s limited summer dining services. A smaller number find temporary summer work at the school’s dormitories.

With an average salary of $16,500, these cooks, chefs and other dining crew earn well below the federal poverty line and represent some of Vanderbilt’s lowest wage earners. (Unlike many universities that outsource food services, including Nashville’s Belmont and Lipscomb universities, Vanderbilt’s dining staff members are direct university employees.) Tight family budgets for this group become tightest in May, June and July when paychecks stop coming in.

“We’ve got employees who’ve been here for years, and they’re laid off in the summer,” said Diana Johns, a Vanderbilt dining employee for more than 40 years who is trying to make things better for her younger colleagues.

“Times are hard,” she said, adding that the first few checks earned during fall semester usually go toward medical benefits that went unpaid during the prior months.

Dissatisfaction among Vanderbilt’s dining staff isn’t new at the prestigious private university, but frustration has bubbled up in recent weeks. Lucas and Johns were among a handful of dining employees who wrote a letter last week to Vanderbilt Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos, published in The Hustler, the school’s student-led newspaper. They said they would like to have a meal with him.

“Despite how hard it will be to keep food on the table, you have an open invitation to join us to see how we live and eat during this time of hardship,” the letter reads.

The next move comes May 1 — on May Day, an organized labor holiday — when Vanderbilt dining employees, alongside a coalition of supporters, including professors and students, have planned a protest outside Kirkland Hall, which houses the school’s administrative offices.

Dining staff employees, some of whom are organized with Laborers Local 386, the Vanderbilt workers’ union, are pushing for one of two remedies: Either the university deliver laid-off dining workers unemployment benefits during the summer, or ensure them other summer employment opportunities. One option for employment, they insist, could be in a different capacity at Vanderbilt University or its medical center. Vanderbilt, according to Nashville Area of Chamber of Commerce data, is the largest employment provider in Nashville. There’s also the multitude of companies that partner with Vanderbilt.

“Vanderbilt has a lot of connections in the community” said employee Anne Aluknois, who works at a coffee shop in the dining hall’s lower level. “Jobs could be developed on a regular basis, so that if you do well at that particular job every summer at a summer camp [for example], you would go back to the summer camp. That makes Vanderbilt look good in the community, and a dining worker — or five or 10 — goes to work.”

When The City Paper asked Vanderbilt whether the administration would comply with the dining staff’s requests, the university’s communications team quickly emailed a bullet-point “fact sheet” on Vanderbilt’s policy with dining workers.

The fact sheet states that Vanderbilt does not hire dining employees for “full-time, 12-month work.” Instead, it hires “regular” and “partial-year” employees with an understanding between both parties that the job timeframe runs from mid-August through the first week of May. Employment over the summer is offered to “regular” employees only when it arises.

According to university, Vanderbilt Dining “on its own” tries to find job opportunities for employees at local summer camps. Dining workers characterize the level of such attempts — summer work is never guaranteed — as “insulting.”

On the issue of unemployment benefits over the summer, Vanderbilt has the law on its side.

State statute says employees of educational institutions who do not work between academic years are not entitled to unemployment compensation as long as there’s “reasonable assurance” the individual will be retained for the next year. (This same law applies to professors and other university faculty, but they aren’t living below the poverty line.)

“Vanderbilt does not grant or deny any employee unemployment benefits,” Elizabeth Latt, Vanderbilt’s assistant vice chancellor of news and communication, said in a prepared statement. “These are granted to unemployed workers by the Tennessee Department of Labor based on eligibility requirements established by state law.”

Supporters of the dining workers’ cause don’t deny this interpretation of the law. They just have trouble understanding why a university that has such enormous resources — its endowment is $3.4 billion — and which proclaims a commitment to the entire Vanderbilt community won’t be flexible for the lowest paid.

“With dining workers, you have about 200 people living people below the poverty line at one of the richest entities in the country,” said Benjamin Eagles, a 2011 graduate of the school and organizer of OUR Vanderbilt, an organization formed to campaign for “economic justice” on the campus. “At the same place where there 10 people earning above a million dollars, you have people living in extreme poverty. And they’re the people who make the university run day to day.”

Labor at Vanderbilt netted a recent win when the university lifted the salaries of all service workers to $10.78 an hour.

But Vanderbilt professors like Lesley Gill, who chairs the university’s anthropology department, sees a larger theme of labor issues at the school. Clerical workers and administrative assistants have also struggled to find a voice, she said. At a recent Occupy Vanderbilt event that highlighted the concerns of the dining workers, Gill said she witnessed human resources employees monitoring the event.

“I found this just incredibly ironic at a university that prides itself on freedom of speech and freedom of expression,” Gill said. Tenured faculty enjoys those rights, she said, but not the dining workers. “It’s almost like there’s two paralleled universes at Vandy.”

Which goes back to the dining workers’ letter invitation to sit down and dine with Zeppos this summer.

“The chancellor has not received any kind of official invitation,” a Vanderbilt spokeswoman told The City Paper when asked whether Zeppos would take them up on the offer.

As four national U.S. student organizations representing more than 4 million students on over 300 college and university campuses, we are writing to express our profound dismay in response to the recent announcement by the Fair Labor Association (FLA) of its intention to form of a “University Advisory Council Student Committee,” a misdirected attempt to pacify growing University concern about the FLA’s track record of failure in upholding the rights of workers producing our college-logo apparel. The announcement of an FLA student committee comes at the height of the FLA’s international notoriety and public discontent in the university community over the organization’s ineffectiveness and track record of failure to enforce Universities’ codes of conduct. In this context, students find the announcement of the committee deeply offensive, and can only infer that the FLA’s intentions are to utilize students as a tool to distract from the systematic and ongoing labor rights violations in factories producing college-logo apparel that the FLA remains silent on or even attempts to defend.

For over a decade, the FLA has claimed that its theoretical influence over apparel companies stems from its intimate relationship with them, even to the extent that companies govern the organization on the FLA’s Board of Directors. Yet, the contrary has proven to be true; the FLA’s relationship with the companies who fund and control it has inevitably led the FLA to defend companies at the expense of hundreds of thousands of workers. The FLA has either defended its member companies committing egregious labor rights violations, or refused to investigate workers’ complaints entirely. For years, students have engaged with our Universities, made our concerns and suggestions clear, and have given the FLA the benefit of the doubt that the organization would implement reforms that would enable it to actually defend the rights of workers making our apparel. Unfortunately, the FLA’s recent announcement demonstrates the organization’s lack of seriousness in addressing their track record of failure, and solving the inherent conflict of interest in the organization’s governance that continues to prevent the FLA from holding corporations accountable for severe labor rights abuse.

If the FLA was serious about engaging students, the organization would simply do what students have been respectfully suggesting for the last 15 years: address the fundamental conflict of interest in its governance structure by removing corporate representation from its board. Instead, the announcement of the student committee is a disappointing step backwards for the FLA. Affiliate members of our organizations refuse to participate in a tokenizing student committee created by an organization that has impeded progress on critical workers’ rights issues in the production of college-logo apparel. In light of the FLA’s misplaced priorities, we continue to call on Universities to disaffiliate from the FLA and to affiliate with the only truly independent labor rights monitor in the world, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC). We encourage university administrators who want to be more attentive to students; the best way to do this is by collaborating directly with student activists on your campus who are bringing critical issues to your attention.

Teresa Cheng, International Campaigns Coordinator, United Students Against Sweatshops

Victor Sanchez, President, United States Student Association

Joe Parker, National Coordinator, Student Farmworker Alliance

Maria Louzon, National Coordinator, United Students for Fair Trade

Want to end sweatshop abuse and help build worker power in the global economy? Join USAS’s Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns Committee!

E-mail President Powers right now to support us. Then call President Powers at 512-471-1232 and tell him to affiliate with the WRC!

Less than 2 weeks ago, I was arrested alongside 17 other members of the Make UT Sweatshop-Free Coalition for peacefully occupying President Powers’ office in an effort to get our school to do what over 180 universities have already done to help end inhumane working conditions for workers sewing our college-logo apparel – affiliate with the WRC, the only independent factory monitor in the world. After running our campaign for three years, President Powers left us with no choice but to take this action. And even after waiting in his office for several hours, he never came out or said a word, but sent his spokesperson to tell us the “case was closed” on the issue of Longhorn apparel made in sweatshop conditions, and then he had us arrested. President Powers still refuses to meet with chosen representatives from our Coalition.

Take one minute to tell President Powers to stop arresting students and to start standup for workers’ rights! Then, make a quick phone call to 512-471-1232 and leave a message for President Powers.

President Powers has yet to take any meaningful action to end Nike and other companies’ egregious violations to workers’ basic rights in the over 4,400 overseas factories that make our school’s apparel. We’re embarrassed that UT has fallen behind 180 other schools and is more willing to throw its students in jail than stand up for human rights. During our first sit-in, messages of support flooded in from garment workers’ unions all around the world, from Honduras to Hong Kong. Your continued support means so much to us, and we know that with your support, we’ll get our school, which rakes in more money from the sale of its apparel than any other school in the world, to finally take a stand against sweatshop labor.

In Solidarity,

Billy Yates
University of Texas Students Against Sweatshops

Want to end sweatshop abuse and help build worker power in the global economy? Join USAS’s Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns Committee!

Right now I’m sitting in at our administration building because for two years our President has refused to listen to students and take a stand against the corporate-run Fair Labor Association (FLA), a corrupt factory monitoring group that whitewashes worker abuse by big brands like Nike. We are sick of being ignored while workers suffer at the hands of the FLA, and we are here until President McCormick does the right thing and finally agrees to disaffiliate from the FLA.

Take Action Now! Email President McCormick now and call him at (848) 932-7454. Tell him to use his final days as Rutgers President to stop the corporate cover-up of sweatshop abuse by dropping the FLA.

One year ago today, we occupied President McCormick’s office demanding that he take students seriously and stop paying the FLA because of their abysmal track record of covering up abuses and history of hindering progress in the anti-sweatshop movement. Today we’re back because while the President has dragged his feet, the FLA has continued to perpetuate worker abuse.  In China, the FLA’s recent recommendations to “fix” horrendous abuses at Apple’s Foxconn factories have led to drastic cuts in workers pay and conditions, driving hundreds of desperate workers back to the rooftops in protest. President McCormick has told us that he wants Rutgers to remain in the FLA  to see if they will make “progress” in China but we know they can’t and wont hold corporations accountable when Nike and Apple control the FLA’s Board of Directors.

Tell President McCormick Rutgers should be to holding corporations accountable, not subsidizing their PR schemes. Call him now at (848) 932-7454, and tell him take a stand for worker rights and to stop paying the FLA.

Today is President McCormick’s final day as President and his last chance reverse course and  take a stand against corporate sweatshop abuse. With your support we can ensure he respects student voices and demonstrates to his successor and the entire university community that Rutgers will no longer tolerate worker rights abuse.

Want to end sweatshop abuse and help build worker power in the global economy? Join USAS’s Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns Committee!

By Kristen Mitchell

The university was issued a grade card and it failed every subject.

Members of the United Students Against Sweatshops marched from the Oval to President E. Gordon Gee’s office in Bricker Hall Wednesday afternoon to present him with a report card grading the university in math, accountability, transparency and its ability to play with others.

“They grade us, and now it’s time to take a step back and for us to grade you on your ethicalness,” said Danya Contractor, a first-year in international studies and USAS member.

Contractor said students were on the Oval to “protest the sale of our university.”

The students advocated against the privatization of parking and proposed apparel deals with the Dallas Cowboys Silver Star Merchandising Line, and the grade card reflected their thoughts on these business initiatives.

USAS argues that Silver Star Merchandising mistreats its sweatshop laborers, and OSU should not enter an agreement with Silver Star. USAS also argues that it is unfair to the 124 companies who have contracts with OSU, and the deal with Silver Star could possibly hurt these companies financially.

Repeated attempts to contact Silver Star over the year have been unsuccessful.

The university is considering a proposal to privatize parking. The deal would include selling its parking to a third-party vendor for an up-front, one-time cost of at least $375 million.

Contractor said the university will lose money on privatized parking and that students will pay more for apparel if OSU makes a deal with the Silver Star Merchandising, resulting in a failing grade in math. She also said OSU has not been accountable to students, faculty and workers and has not listened to their feedback regarding either issue.

The group said the university failed in its ability to play well with others, citing that the administration cares more about profit than supporting local business and the Columbus community at large, as well as in transparency due to “back-door deals with sweatshop users.”

“I want to know where my shirt that says ‘Buckeyes’ is coming from. I want to know if a girl in Cambodia was sewing it for 19 hours,” Contractor said.

A small crowd of students marched to Bricker Hall to find that Gee was not in his office, and that he would be out for the rest of the week. They presented their report card and their reasoning for the low grades to Julie Anstine, administrative director and assistant to the president.

Shukri Farah, a second-year in international studies, said she hopes the report card will spark change in how the university handles business decisions in the future.

“I don’t want them to hand out a decision,” Farah said.

Farah said she would like to see the administration actively listen to students and faculty before it makes any business deals with outside corporations.

“I would like to see an email from Gordon Gee telling us what’s going on and asking for student feedback,” Farah said.

University officials said they encourage comments on actions of the university.

“The university has been engaged with USAS representatives and has been having good conversations with them about their concerns,” said Jim Lynch, university spokesman. “We are hopeful that our continued dialogue with them will help us advance the broader issues of how to continue to improve social responsibility programming.”

USAS has organized several protests this academic year regarding the Silver Star deal, but this is the first rally concerning the privatization of parking. Contractor said people shouldn’t ignore the price increases agreed upon in the contract and other possible consequences of selling parking rights to a private company.

“You can say, ‘Oh, it’ll never come to that,’” Contractor said. “But why would we want to give away the power?”

Want to end sweatshop abuse and help build worker power in the global economy? Join USAS’s Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns Committee!