PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Call to Action: Phone Bomb Chancellor Nordernberg in Support of Joining the WRC
by Hal Smith Wednesday, Mar. 23, 2005 at 12:26 PM
rakovsky@excite.com

A call from Students in Solidarity at the University of Pittsburgh for people to phone Chancellor Nordenberg and tell him to join the Worker Rights Consortium, a group that monitors the sweatshops that make University apparel.

Have you ever wondered when you looked at the "made in Pakistan" tag on your Pitt clothes, "Did this come from a sweatshop? When the manufacturer outsourced US jobs to Asia, was it only so that it their workers could toil under bad conditions for pennies?

Unfortunately these kinds of questions could be hard to come by so long as Pitt belongs to the poorly named "Fair Labor Association." After all, what's fair about a "labor" organization with an executive board of 6 corporate representatives, 6 NGOs (half of them corporate-funded), and only 3 board members for more than a hundred educational institutions? The main labor and church participants, called "UNITE" and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility both left because the association would not reconsider its position on wages and workers' rights to organize themselves.

Besides the fact that the corporations being monitored by the FLA are the same ones who run it (eg. Nike, Levis) there are other inherent flaws. The FLA does not prevent excessive working hours,require wages that will keep a family from destitution, or require public disclosure of factory conditions. In fact, the small print allows factories to apply for "de minimis" status where they basically don't have to follow any rules. Only 10% of a company's factories have to be monitored annually, and the corporations can even choose which ones they will be.

Recently many universities are realizing that the FLA is not much of a "labor organization." While Pitt is currently a member, others like the University of Iowa and Georgetown University have joined the Workers Rights Consortium while retaining or dropping their FLA membership. Unlike the FLA, the WRC demands full public disclosure of working conditions, "living wages" and hours, and is controlled by universities, labor rights scholars, and United Students against Sweatshops, a student group.

With this in mind, a Pitt workers rights group called Students in Solidarity is campaigning for the university to join the WRC. At the University of Minnesota, SGA president Matt Clark said that, ""The popular opinion was to sign on to the WRC," the university's president "listened to the students and signed on."

We believe this can happen at Pitt too. This Thursday please call Pitt Chancellor Mark Nordenberg, if you have any affiliation with Pitt or not, (412-624-4200) and request that Pitt join Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne Univity in the WRC.

Here's our suggested script:

Hi my name is ________ and I'd like to leave a message for Chancellor Nordenberg. I feel that the industry influence in the Fair Labor Association makes it extremely ineffective as a monitor of labor conditions. I strongly urge that the university join the Worker Rights Consortium, which has proven to be both independent and effective. For a university with a licensing program as large as Pitt's, joining should not be a financial burden. I believe that the use of sweatshops is a bad business decision and prevents the University of Pittsburgh from living up to its community and ethical commitments."

Please make sure to leave your name and contact information.

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