Gannett News Service
July 12, 1999
by Kathleen Wickham

WASHINGTON - About 80 college students gathered outside the U.S. Labor Department Friday calling for full disclosure of the location of overseas sweatshop factories and a living wage for overseas garment workers sewing goods for American companies.

More than 100 campus leaders active in the two-year-old grass roots campus organization, United Students Against Sweatshops, will join the students this weekend. The group is meeting in Washington through Monday to discuss organizational activities relating to its campaign to end sweatshop conditions in overseas garment factories.

Participants include students from the University of California system, the University of Kentucky, the University of Oregon and 41 other colleges and universities.

Student leaders at the rally said the Fair Labor Association, established in light of controversies over foreign labor practices, does not go far enough in monitoring factory conditions in such places as the Northern Mariana Islands , a U.S. commonwealth.

The students delivered a letter to U.S. Labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman calling for open monitoring of foreign textile factories. Currently, monitors are paid by the garment manufacturers, which the students view as a conflict of interest.

Marion Traub-Werner, a senior Latin American studies major at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, said the student organization views the FLA as a "smokescreen" because it limits public disclosure of information relating to factory inspections.

"To make corporations accountable to consumers, to make universities accountable to students, to make the Department of Labor accountable to the U.S. people, this information has to be made available to the public," she said.

The Fair Labor Association was formed by apparel companies, human rights organizations, universities and consumer advocates in 1996 to fight sweatshop labor in the overseas garment industry. The sweatshop issue resurfaced three years ago when TV host Kathie Lee Gifford apologized after learning her line of clothing was made by underpaid labor.

U.S. apparel companies have affirmed their commitment to fair labor practices.

Carl Fillichio, a labor department spokesman, said, "the Fair Labor Association is an independent external monitoring organization. The key words are 'independent' and 'external.'"

Congress now has before it half a dozen bills mandating reform in Saipan. The Clinton administration is pushing for a federal takeover of the territory's labor and immigration controls. But it needs congressional approval, and Saipan has powerful allies on Capitol Hill.

The students want foreign companies employing workers to sew garments for American companies to pay the United States minimum wage of $5.15 an hour.

Former Saipan textile worker Chie Abad, who spoke at the rally outside the labor department, said living and working conditions are deplorable in Saipan, the largest island in the Northern Marianas.

Abad, who paid a job broker $2,000 in her native Philippines for a job in Saipan, said she worked as an assistant supervisor in a Korean-owned factory for four years before getting fired for union organizing.

"The workers were locked up. They were treated just like slaves. They worked seven days a week, 14 hours a day or more," Abad said. "I was fired from my job. But I know that I am not the victim."

In the last year, the student organization sponsored sit-ins and demonstrations on 150 college campuses nationwide. At 15 major schools, the students won full public disclosure of vendor locations relating to the production of clothes bearing college logos. At 17 universities, the students were able to get language included in campus Codes of Conduct guaranteeing the protection of human rights of workers producing college gear.

Copyright 1999