There is a new art space hidden behind the traffic cones and construction signs on North Main and University Avenue. Located two storefronts beyond The Atlantic, The Gifthorse has much to offer visitors willing to walk past the dust and debris of Downtown’s redevelopment.

On the ground floor, visitors will find a variety of sweatshop free apparel. Roberto Evans, the store owner, doesn’t support the larger department stores and supermarkets because they sell clothing that was made under exploitative labor practices.

“I have nothing against the employees or the owners of stores like Wal-mart,” says Evans. “I just want people to buy apparel that looks good, that was made well and made honestly.”

Under the orange overhang upstairs, visitors will find The Gifthorse Gallery. The gallery will feature a new artist every month, with an opening celebration occurring the first Saturday of the month.

Patrons of Downtown’s Art Walk will recognize the new gallery as the evolution of Evans’ other entrepreneurial enterprise, The Exchange. Evans opened The Exchange (on University Avenue and 8th St) as a space for local artists and musicians to share ideas, play music and showcase art.

In addition to being a venue and gallery, The Exchange also sold sweat-shop-free apparel designed by Evans and companies like Threadless and TOMS. As both sides of The Exchange grew in popularity, Evans worried one might overshadow the other.

To prevent this, he decided to create The Gifthorse. With the extra space, The Exchange was able to expand and now offers yoga and dance classes. Moving the clothing to The Gifthorse also allowed Evans to stock more brands specializing in sweatshop free apparel, as well as open the new art gallery on the second floor.

As of now, The Gifthorse Gallery showcases artists by invitation only. This is a different model than The Exchange, which focuses on providing all local artists and musicians exposure to the community.

“The Exchange stirs Gainesville’s art pot continually,” explains Evans, “while The Gifthorse shows artists who have already proven themselves.”

With this model, Evans envisions that The Gifthorse will lift the aspirations of Gainesville’s local artists. He hopes that with a few years of community support, he can begin to bring in more widely renowned artists.

“Gainesville is an educated, conscious and compassionate town,” says Evans. “It has the type of people who encourage ideas like mine to work.”

There will be a grand opening celebration for The Gifthorse Gallery on Oct. 6, from 7pm -10pm. It will feature the art of Sebastain Castro. The first floor apparel store is currently open, and you can stop by from 2pm -7pm, Tuesday through Thursday, and 2pm -8pm, Friday and Saturday.

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.

The Worker Rights Consortium (which I’ve previously written about here) issued a report in October describing the ways the factory closings were improper and illegal. Workers in the factories were owed more than $2 million in back pay, and UW decided its code of conduct for workers had been violated.

Coming on the heels of a major victory over Russell Athletic in the Fall, this lends new credibility to a student anti-sweatshop movement that seems to be finding its second wind. UW is big and so is its football program, so they just hit Nike where it hurts: its bottom line.

Two weeks ago, Gina Cano and Lowlee Urquia, former workers from the factories, visited UF and, through translators, gave an emotional presentation on their lives as sweatshop workers, and the devastation caused by the sudden closing of the plant.

Earlier that day, I took part in on a meeting with them, representatives from the national United Students Against Sweatshops, two fellow members of Gators for a Sweatshop-Free Campus, and representatives of the UF administration. After hearing from the workers, Ed Poppell, UF’s Vice President for Business Affairs and Anna Prizzia, director of the Office of Sustainability, said they intended to side with students in support of UF joining the WRC.

Cano and Lowlee are now on a USAS-sponsored tour across the United States, where they’re visiting college campuses to explain how students and their universities can support the fight for workers’ rights. We’ll have a story on their visit and UF’s ongoing progress toward becoming a member of the WRC in the April issue of the Fine Print.

Fine Print editor Lydia Fiser recently dug up an old Nation article about how a similar battle played out a few years ago at Florida State, a “campus known more for holding national titles in football and ‘party school’ rankings than for student protest activity (sound familiar?).” The FSU student body supported WRC membership, but activists had to wage months of protests. The ultimately set up a tent city on their version of the Plaza of the Americas, which they kept up for months:

The tent-city protest was intended to end a long debate with the administration, which refuses to join the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), a sweatshop monitoring agency backed by the protesters and faculty, which passed a resolution supporting the students’ position. Instead, the arrests marked the beginning of a long standoff between the administration and student protesters, who now find themselves living in tents and sleeping bags to protest both the sweatshop issue and the administration’s refusal to tolerate the earlier protest–well after their classmates have gone home for the summer.

FSU ultimately joined the WRC, only to leave a few years later. So what was true for them then may be true for us now:

Sit-ins, protests and campouts have been required at many of the 100 universities who have now joined the WRC, and in this respect, FSU is no different. But the consequences of Florida State joining the WRC could be much more substantial than those at many of the other member schools, which might explain why the conflict has become so protracted at Florida State. Pendas says the possible impact of FSU joining is “huge…. We’re such a big university…and we’re in the South, for Christ’s sake!” He predicts a “domino effect” that would result in several other Florida universities joining–perhaps most importantly, the University of Florida, another football powerhouse with millions in licensing revenue pouring in each year.

The fight on our campus is important, and to some extent, history is on our side. Other southern schools, including our SEC rivels at Tennessee – have joined the WRC. And UF recently decided to stop licencing with Russell Athletic, which just lost a long battle with workers and students over a closed factory in Honduras. We have no illusions that voting “yes” will gaurantee UF joining the WRC – itself only a small part of the efforts to end the “race to the bottom” that continues to drive down wages and working conditions in the world’s poor countries – but it will surely help.

Russell Athletic, a major maker of licensed collegiate apparel, reached an agreement to rehire workers it had fired for trying to form a union, and to allow workers to organize in its other Honduran factories.

The Times quotes WRC director Scott Nova:

“This represents the maturation of the universities’ codes of conduct. There’s a recognition by the universities of their ability to influence the actions of important brands and change outcomes for the better.”

He said the agreement was “unprecedented” in terms of scope and size and in “the transformative impact it can have in one of the hardest regions of the world to win respect for workers’ rights.”

Mr. Nova also praised Russell for changing course. “I think the executives at Russell recognized it was time for a new approach,” he said. “They decided it was important for the success of their company.”

But this is my favorite part:

“For us, it was very important to receive the support of the universities,” Moises Alvarado, president of the union at the closed plant in Choloma, said by telephone on Tuesday. “We are impressed by the social conscience of the students in the United States.”

Which is exactly why UF should join the WRC. As a marketing powerhouse in the world of collegiate athletic apparel, we have the power to ensure human rights are respected in factories everywhere. Right now we’re a member of the Fair Labor Organization – an industry-sponsored group that did nothing for the workers in Honduras.

UF actually cut ties with Russell after USAS contacted them during its campaign in solidarity with Central American factory workers. I’d say that’s a start, but I hope it’s only the beginning.

-Edward Everett

After semesters of relative inactivity, UF Amnesty International is back! Amnesty International is a nonprofit, non-affiliated human rights advocacy and action organization that works both internationally and locally to promote humanitarian efforts. Meetings are structured to maximize the number of humanitarian issues discussed by having members present on topics they feel most passionate about, including women’s rights, immigrant rights and LGBT rights.

The group will be hosting a three-night Genocide Awareness film screening Oct. 20-22 at 7:20 p.m. in NPB 1101 in an effort to bring overdue attention to egregious crimes of genocide all over the world. The event will allow students to take action through letter-writing and petitioning.

UF Amnesty International Day of Action will be Nov. 4 in Plaza of the Americas from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. There will be different tables set up, each representing different Amnesty International priorities. Students can learn more about international human rights crises and take action by signing petitions or writing letters.

Along with Human Rights Awareness and The Fine Print, UF Amnesty International is also working on a Sweat Shop Free Gators campaign demanding that all UF apparel come from factories that adhere to workers’ rights laws.

UF Amnesty International is volunteering with Project Downtown Gainesville to serve Saturday lunch to those in need.

For more information on UF Amnesty International, check out the Facebook page. E-mail the group at ufamnesty@gmail.com, or follow them on Twitter.