By Nadine Navarro
Why UF agreed to join the Workers Rights Consortium
Every day, average Americans drive to their jobs, work for about four hours and then take a legally mandated lunch break for 30 minutes to an hour. After about four more hours of work, they go home.
But Gina Cano and Lowlee Urquia’s workdays were nothing like that. Gina and Lowlee were Honduran sweatshop workers, and they worked as long as it took to make their quota with unpaid overtime, a 15-minute lunch break and medical deductions from their $40 weekly paychecks that amounted to a lack of decent medical services. But as horrific as that sounds to students in the U.S., this job provided them with the few resources that they needed to keep their families alive.
Now that they’ve lost even that, Gina and Lowlee no longer have the chance of giving their children an education or any hopes of owning their own houses.
Lowlee, a single mother of four, can no longer afford to pay for her children’s transportation to school, so she was forced to discontinue their education, Lowlee said in Spanish, alongside Gina, at a presentation translated to English. She also had to suspend the medical treatments that her mother was receiving, as she can no longer afford it.
Gina had a big dream of owning a small house for her family to call its own, but now those dreams are long gone along with her job, Gina said at the presentation.
These two women are not alone. Gina and Lowlee are just two of the 1,656 workers who lost their factory jobs at Hugger and Vision Tex, two Honduran sweatshops, in January 2009, leaving them with no resources to sustain their families.
Many people in Honduras have no other choice but to work under such conditions if they want keep their families afloat, Gina said.
But Gina and Lowlee are not like most people in Honduras; they have decided to take a stand for their rights in order to stop the inhumane treatment of sweatshop workers. These two women are traveling around the U.S. in a 30-state tour starting in Florida and ending in Washington, funded by United Students Against Sweatshops, hoping to find people interested in their message who will take a stand beside them.
“We are in this journey knowing that we will be put on the black list, but we just don’t care anymore,” Gina said. “We just want to fight for what is fair because if these conditions keep going, they will get worse, and we fear that they might even lead us to a state of slavery.”
To kick off their tour, Gina and Lowlee spoke at UF last month about their struggles in the sweatshops and their problems without it.
They explained that after they were fired, the workers from both of these factories were negleted and denied their severance pay.
An estimated $2.1 million was owed to these workers in severance pay.
To date, Gina and the unemployed workers from Hugger have been able to recover 21.5 percent of the money owed to them by selling the leftover machinery from the factory. Lowlee and the workers from Vision Tex have been able to recover 26.5 percent of the money owed to them using this same method.
The women explained how important it is for people to be aware of where their clothes are being made and who is making them. Everyone can make a difference just by being informed and buying clothes that are not made in sweatshops.
“Many people think that protesting against sweatshops won’t help us because they think that any job is better than no job,” Gina said. “But while having a job is better than not having one at all, continuing on this path will lead to worse things.”
But protest can do much more than one can imagine. It brings to light problems that were sitting in the dark before given attention. Those problems, in this case, are the ones that Gina and Lowlee are going through.
“By bringing these former Nike workers, we are hoping to make our campaign stronger by educating people on what is going on,” said Rama Issa-Ibrahim, president of Human Rights Awareness on Campus. “I think people can draw a closer connection to the cause if they meet people who have suffered or gone through the hardships of working under precarious conditions that are presented in sweatshops.”
It is for the rights of individuals, like Gina and Lowlee, that organizations like Human Rights Awareness on Campus and UF Amnesty International work for.
These two UF student organizations partnered to form the Gators for a Sweatshop Free Campus, a campaign they’ve led with the support of many other campus groups over the last year.
The purpose of this campaign is to make UF apparel sweatshop-free, said Elena Quiroz, executive officer of UF Amnesty International. Furthermore, Gators for a Sweatshop Free Campus wants the university to adhere to the standards set by the Workers Rights Consortium, a labor rights organization led by university faculty, students and labor rights experts who work to regulate fair wages and the treatment of garment employees, especially in the factories that produce college-affiliated clothing.
The WRC gives workers a voice by putting them in contact with universities who are willing to speak up for them. Universities that are affiliated with the WRC give companies a code of conduct by which they must abide, and if a company breaks this code, they are then penalized by law.
“Already, more than a hundred universities have affiliated themselves with WRC because of student opposition to sweatshops. This includes Florida State University, Arizona State University, Washington State and of course a huge number of other public universities, as well as private ones,” said Rafiya Javed, vice president of external affairs for Human Rights Awareness on Campus. “UF currently abides by the standards set by the Fair Labor Association, but these aren’t comprehensive enough and do not ensure that subcontractors are actually even treating their workers fairly.”
The problem is that the FLA receives much of its funding from the apparel industry itself, so it encourages the companies to set their own rules. It also does not require that workers be paid a living wage, which is essential to live a poverty-free life.
Campus activist organizations believe that the switch to the WRC would make a tremendous difference in the lives of individuals like Gina and Lowlee.
For the same $50,000 that UF spends annually on its FLA membership, it could join the WRC, which exposed the injustice in Honduras. Joining WRC would also allow UF to require the companies who sell the licensed apparel that UF students buy to pay their workers a living wage.
“Joining the WRC would ensure that UF-licensed clothes would not come from sweatshop factories,” Issa-Ibrahim said.
The Gators for a Sweatshop Free Campus campaign has already had some success among administration.
On the morning Gina and Lowlee spoke at UF, representatives from both of these groups met with administration officials to discuss the possibility of a change to the WRC standards, and they were told that the university would start to move forward in the process, said Emily Flynn, president of UF Amnesty International. About a week later, the University Athletic Department signed off on the preposition.
A letter of intent has been signed by the university saying that it intends to join the WRC. As of now, the university is working on drawing up a code of conduct and when to begin enforcement.
UF joining the WRC is expected to have a great impact on the sweatshop industry and the companies who buy from it.
It would put pressure on the companies to follow the rules put out by the WRC and give power to the universities in terms of being able to regulate and penalize the companies for misconduct, said Rod Palmquist, national organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops. UF ranks No. 2 in sports apparel sales by the Collegiate Licensing Company, so joining the WRC will have a tremendous influence on athletic apparel companies, as well as other universities.
“UF kind of taking the lead will hopefully make universities think twice about joining as well,” Palmquist said.
Tags: Featured • sweatshops • workers' rights