To the Point:

No sweat

By William E. Scheuerman
UUP President

UUP scored a major victory earlier this year. We participated in a coalition that successfully lobbied the New York state Legislature for a law that could end the sale of sweatshop goods on SUNY campuses. We did this quietly without a lot of fanfare. But it’s an important victory. Sweatshops, after all, are not a 19th century phenomenon, as some of us imagine. They exist throughout the Third World.

Large companies, such as Nike, for instance, rely on sweatshops to produce expensive athletic goods that they sell in college bookstores throughout the United States. Walk through any SUNY bookstore and you’ll see these high-priced goods on the racks. Yes, the goods are pricey, but production costs are low. By exploiting cheap labor and avoiding U.S. tax laws and labor and environmental regulations, sweatshop producers make huge profits. These big profits come at great human cost.

Sweatshop workers labor for long hours under the worst conditions imaginable. Their work stations, if you can actually call them that, lack space, fresh air and adequate lighting. Toilet facilities often don’t exist. If they do, workers can only use them with permission from a boss, and that doesn’t come easily. Access to a toilet often becomes part of a game that allows bosses to tighten their grips on the workers. Workers simply have no rights. Last year, we reported on maquiladora workers at the Duro plant in Mexico and their futile attempt to form a union. Their working conditions — described in blunt detail — are typical, as were the company’s reliance on “goons” to stop an organizing drive.

The preponderance of twisted and maimed bodies of assembly line workers reminds us of the absence of the health and safety protections we take for granted in the U.S. Many of the workers are children. All are paid substandard wages. In fact, if you want to get a better feel for how sweatshop workers live, just cross the Texas border into the maquiladoras of Mexico. There you’ll see workers living in cardboard huts without plumbing or electricity. The mud streets are covered with raw sewage, and residents often comb garbage dumps in search of their next meal. These conditions, so reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, are not at all unusual.

This August, Gov. George Pataki signed the Higher Education Sweatfree Bill into law. The new law does not totally prohibit the sale of sweatshop goods on campuses, but it does redefine “lowest responsible bidder” in a way that allows SUNY schools to purchase non-sweatshop apparel. The goal now is to convince SUNY to exercise this option.

To this end, UUP is participating in a coalition of labor unions and community groups that is developing strategies and tactics that will eventually drive sweatshop goods off campus. We’ve made some gains in this struggle, but we still have a lot of work to do. You can do your part by making sure to let your campus store manager know that you won’t buy sweatshop goods.