While some individuals might question what they can do to help distant workers toiling in exploitative sweatshops, a number of US cities have taken a stand by passing ordinances requiring that municipal purchases of uniforms and sports gear pass a sweatshop-free test. To help build support for such a measure in Providence, workers from sweatshops that produce products for Wal-Mart, and workers from socially responsible factories, are slated to visit the city in February.
Earlier this month, city councilors David Segal of Ward One and Miguel Luna of Ward Nine introduced an ordinance requiring that Providence buy apparel from only those factories that “respect the basic human rights of their workers.” The potential impact is significant since, as Segal says, the city has bought an average of $1.3 million in apparel over each of the last four years.
Asked about the outlook for making the measure into law, he says, “I don’t think it will be much trouble — the costs are low, the reward substantial. I think that most people on the council are pretty wary of [supporting] practices that are so explicitly exploitative.”
The Workers Rights Consortium (www.workersrights.org) has surveyed apparel purchases at colleges and universities since the late ’90s, and Brown was the first school to join the organization. Cities across the US, including Madison, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and San Francisco, among others, have added their weight to the effort by adopting sweatshop-free requirements.
To help rally support for the Providence measure, which is based on the one in Madison, sweatshop workers from around the globe who create products for Wal-Mart are slated to speak at Brown University on February 6. The event is being organized with the help of the International Labor Rights Fund. United Students Against Sweatshops is helping to organize a Providence event with workers from socially responsible factories on February 19. (Details on the time and location of the discussions will be posted closer to the days of the events on www.rifuture.org.)
With Maryland having recently adopted a requirement that Wal-Mart contribute to the health-care of its employees, the sweatshop-free ordinance seems another way in which government can provide a check against some of the excesses of the marketplace.
Segal sees it as also signaling a resurgence of the anti-sweatshop movement that flourished on college campuses, including Brown, in the late ’90s. “Right now, there’s a new push at the college level,” he says, including an initiative that would provide the right to organize unions for workers in the factories already affiliated with the Workers Rights Consortium. On the whole, Segal believes, the student movement has “had a substantial impact.”
Similar efforts being considered by council proponents include an anti-predatory lending ordinance, and a practice, utilized in some other communities, in which municipal employees can invest their deferred income in socially responsible investments.
