Young transport workers worldwide are looking for greater recognition and voice in their unions. At this week’s International Transport Workers’ Federation congress, young delegates held their own one-day conference to brainstorm ways to address to young workers issues both in the workplace and in the movement. The ITF formed a young workers steering committee in 2006 and have been supportive of their work since. But, young workers still do not have a formal voice in the federation, and they introduced a constitutional amendment that would give them that recognition. (The vote is on Aug 12.) To push for the amendment they created this great video chronicling their work over the past four years:
Young transport workers are urging the ITF Congress to formally recognise them as a fully fledged part of the ITF’s structures. Formal recognition within the ITF constitution would give the young workers – representing the under-35s – similar status as the ITF women transport workers’ committee.
An amendment to the constitution which would put the recommendation of the young transport workers into effect is scheduled for debate at the Congress plenary session on Thursday (12 August).
A youth steering committee was set up following the 2006 Congress and has since been building a network of young active transport trade unionists around the world.
At this week’s conference in Mexico City, speakers stressed that greater participation by young workers was an essential tool in the objective of building strong unions and international solidarity.
The one-day conference was welcomed by ITF president Randall Howard and general secretary David Cockroft, who commended steering committee members for their hard work.
The more than 100 delegates watched a film produced by the ITF about the work of the steering committee. They later broke into working groups to consider five topics: climate change, precarious work, strengthening the ITF’s young workers’ network, organising and campaigning and making the work of young activists relevant to young workers in the workplace.
ITF youth officer Ingo Marowsky said afterwards that he was delighted with the level of support for the conference and the participation of delegates. “It was a very positive event, which clearly underlined the point that young transport workers are not the future, they are here now and eager to play their part in the trade union movement both nationally and internationally.”
He added: “We are on our way to enabling our young members to play their part in implementing the Strong Unions – Sustainable Transport strategy.”
Student activists and courageous workers had a huge victory over Nike yesterday when the company came to an agreement with CGT union in Honduras, continuing a string of recent victories by United Students Against Sweatshops. The victory is significant both because it is the first time a major brand took responsibility for its subcontracted suppliers and because it reflects the way student organizing is transforming the global economy.
1,800 former employees at two Honduran factories, Hugger and Vision Tex, closed in January 2009, settled with Nike for $1.5 million in severance pay, nine months of paid medical care, job training and priority hiring by Nike’s other Honduran suppliers, which is nearly everything they are owed. In a statement announcing the agreement, Nike and CGT “committed to working together, in conjunction with other stakeholders in Honduras, to develop long-term, sustainable approaches to providing workers with social protection when facing unemployment.”
By paying the legally mandated severance, Nike is agreeing to make right the wrongs by its subcontractor – a first in the anti-sweatshop movement. “Up until now, major apparel brands have steadfastly refused to take any direct financial responsibility for the obligations to the workers in their contractors’ factories,” Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, told the New York Times. “Now the most high-profile sports apparel firm has done just that.”
SLAC, the USAS affiliate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, rallies with a giant likeness of Bucky the Badger and a Honduran flag. 4/9/2010 (Credit: Badger Herald)
The victory comes after UW-Madison and Cornell cut their lucrative contracts with Nike, the largest sportswear company in the world. This was the first time a campus ever ended its deal with Nike over working conditions in their factories, despite a long track record dating back to 2001 when students pushed Nike to recognize the union of workers at their supplier in Kukdong, Mexico. “This is a watershed moment for the student anti-sweatshop movement,” says USAS International Campaigns Coordinator Linda Gomaa.
In addition to all of the pressure placed on Nike directly, the recent victories with Russel Athletic and the new brand being built by Knights Apparel made in sweat-free factories hopefully are convincing companies that students won’t back down until they take responsibility for working conditions throughout the supply line. Jack Mahoney, one of the national organizers for USAS told the New York Times, “After we got over 100 universities to boycott Russell, Nike understood the university pressure would not simply go away.”
Alta Gracia factory, which produces college-logo clothing for Knights Apparel, is paying fair wages, treating its workers with respect, allowing them the opportunity to form a union if they so choose, and keeping its shop floor clean and safe. Why? Because student activists, along with the Workers Rights Consortium, unions and community allies, pushed them to do so.
Last week students and community activists surrounded the home of the Nike lobbyist to push the company to stop making their apparel in sweatshops. Now Nike’s leading competitor is showing them what that looks like. The creation of a line of collegiate apparel sold in actual college bookstores that is certified by the Workers Rights Consortium is a significant step forward in the fight to eradicate sweatshops, and hopefully a model that other companies and industries will adopt. (If you are in the market for some sweat-free college clothes, be sure to buy Alta Gracia!)
When a few student activists came together to form USAS they were told it couldn’t be done. Told the could not change the global economy to put a premium on worker’s rights. Told that their purchasing power didn’t matter. Well with the opening of Alta Gracia in the Dominican Republic, its clear none of that was true.
Below is the email USAS sent out about the victory and below that is a story from the AFL-CIO’s blog with a video of the workers.
Ever since student activists first formed USAS in the ’90s, apparel corporations and college administrators insisted it was impossible to produce our schools’ clothes in union factories that pay living wages. It’s time to officially put that excuse to rest.
A decade ago, workers began organizing a union at BJ&B, the Dominican Republic factory making Nike and Reebok caps for U.S. universities. USAS and BJ&B workers struggled together through a series of unprecedented victories and devastating losses. Yesterday, the New York Times announced that former BJ&B unionists are making history again: At the Alta Gracia factory, the courageous women who led the union efforts at BJ&B are finally making university apparel with a strong union and living wages!
Celebrate this major step forward: share the New York Times article, and make a donation to USAS! Your support is crucial to continue the struggle to make every apparel corporation source from union factories and pay a fair price to workers.
In 2003, after 20 BJ&B workers leading the union effort were fired, USAS launched a campaign targeting Nike and Adidas/Reebok, the main brands sourcing from the factory. Not only did workers win their jobs back, but they won a historic union contract with wages and benefits that the New York Times called “unheard of.” But the victory was short lived. Brands began systematically pulling out their business and moving to non-union sweatshops, flagrantly violating universities’ apparel codes of conduct. In 2007 Nike announced the closure of BJ&B – punishing the factory for improving labor standards. USAS and BJ&B workers’ union, FEDOTRAZONAS, fought to bring the good union jobs back to over 2,000 workers left jobless in Villa Altagracia, the community devasted by BJ&B’s closing.
Now, after a decade of campaigns by garment workers and USAS targeting apparel brands, Knights Apparel – Nike’s largest competitor in the collegiate apparel market – has agreed to open the new factory in Villa Altagracia, hire back all of the BJ&B union leaders, recognize their union and pay a fair price so that the union can bargain for living wages. The apparel will be sold in bookstores under the brand name Alta Gracia.
I am proud to be a member of this organization that has fought alongside workers in the Dominican Republic for a decade. What’s happening in Villa Altagracia is yet another step for USAS and garment workers in changing the university apparel industry. Together we’ll keep working towards the day when all university apparel will be produced in union factories where workers can collectively bargain for living wages.
Congratulations to every generation of USASers who fought in solidarity with BJ&B workers!
The struggle continues,
Casey Sweeney
Cornell Organization for Labor Action
The first-known apparel factory in the developing world to pay a living wage is operating in Villa Altagracia, a small impoverished town in the Dominican Republic. For the first time, the 120 workers at the factory will be paid enough to support themselves and their families.
The factory and brand, Alta Gracia, is named after the town and is owned by Spartanburg, S.C.-based Knights Apparel, the leading supplier of college-logo apparel to U.S. universities, according to the Collegiate Licensing Co. Alta Gracia pays the workers about three-and-a-half times the average pay of the country’s apparel workers—and allows workers to join a union without interference.
We’re hoping to prove that doing good can be good business, that they’re not mutually exclusive.
For two years, Knights worked closely with the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), a group of 186 universities that press factories making college-logo apparel to treat workers fairly. Scott Nova, the consortium’s executive director, says the WRC reached an agreement with Knights last year to create a model apparel plant, which pays a living wage, is neutral in union elections and allows union organizers full access to the plant.
Nova says:
This is a victory for the student activists and the sweatshop activists in the labor movement who have been advocating for better conditions in the apparel industry. This factory is a powerful symbol of what is possible.
He says it shows that the present model of low-wage, anti-union, poor conditions apparel sweatshops is not one we have to live with—it’s the choice of the employers.
The workers formed a union and held the founding meeting last month. The AFL-CIO Solidarity Center assisted the workers in forming a union and establishing labor standards at the factory.
The factory already has orders to make T-shirts and sweatshirts for bookstores at 400 American universities. The T-shirts will cost about $18 retail—the same as brands like Nike and Adidas. United Students Against Sweatshops plans to distribute fliers at college bookstores urging freshmen to buy the Alta Gracia shirts.
The T-shirts will be marketed with tags depicting Alta Gracia employees and the message: “Your purchase will change our lives.” The tags also will contain the WRC endorsement, the first-ever for the group. Knights is preparing a video for bookstores to show and a Web documentary, both highlighting the improvements in workers’ lives.
The factory previously was owned by BJ&B, a Korean company that supplied baseball caps and other university logo apparel to Nike and Reebok. The plant closed with no notice in 2007, throwing hundreds of workers, mainly women, out of work.
Nova says the main benefit of the factory is that it gives hope to the workers:
It’s the difference between life and misery. Now they can make enough to support a family.
Fresh off the press is this exciting action by United Students Against Sweatshops who have been fighting for justice for Honduran garment workers who are being denied legally mandated severance after two Nike factories closed in January 2009. USAS chapters have been pushing their campuses to cut their contracts with Nike until they pay the $1,300/worker. So far UW-Madison and Cornell have sent the message to Nike that they do not want their logo on sweatshop made clothes. To make this message as personal for Nike executives as the lack of severance is for the workers, USAS plastered the front door of the lobbying arm of Nike with letters from the workers. Read on, and then find out how to get involved at: justpayit.usas.org
Early this morning, just blocks away from Congress, USAS members and community activists knocked on the front door of Nike’s lobbying headquarters. The students, armed with handwritten letters from the ex-workers of two Nike supplier factories in Honduras, came to speak with Brad Figel, Nike’s Director of Government Relations. The workers’ letters emphasized the daily suffering in the past 18 months of the 1,800 workers that Nike owes $2.2 in legally mandated severance.
Mr. Nigel was unavailable, so the students covered the front of the building in flyers to educate Nike’s neighbors and the many pedestrians passing by.
Did that laptop you are using help fund a rapist? What about the iPhone or Blackberry you use, did that help pay for weapons used to commit mass slaughter?
Young workers can use their enormous buying power for good, if they are informed and given the tools necessary to make a difference. In his New York Times column yesterday, Nicholas Kristof gave us the information and pointed us to the tools.
War is raging in the Congo and the mining of tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold for use in laptops, cameras, and smartphones is partially funding it. Of the war’s brutality, Kristof writes, “In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides.”
Several years ago studies of how diamond profits were funding war, including a movie “Blood Diamond” with Leonardo DiCaprio, led many brides-to-be telling jewelry sellers they will only buy conflict-free diamonds. And the industry responded, working with activists to create a system for keeping the transactions away from the violent groups. Blood diamonds are still an issue, and there are flaws in the inspection system, but the activism made a difference.
Now we must make an issue of products we use and purchase far more often than diamonds. First, watch this video spoof on the I’m a Mac/I’m a PC commercial that details how what is going on:
Second, take action, send an email to the top 21 companies using the minerals fueling war. Then bookmark raisehopeforcongo.org, created by the ENOUGH Project, to stay informed.
When I wrote my email, here is what Nintendo wrote back:
from
nintendo@noa.nintendo.com
date
Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 8:51 PM
subject
Re: Make your products conflict-free
mailed-by
noa.nintendo.com
Hello and thank you for contacting Nintendo,
On behalf of Nintendo I appreciate the opportunity to respond. Nintendo
does not purchase any metals as raw materials. As a remote purchaser that
buys finished components made from many materials, Nintendo requires its
suppliers to comply with its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
Procurement Guidelines, which stipulate suppliers comply with applicable
laws, have respect for human rights, and conduct their business in an
appropriate and fair manner.
Sincerely,
Nintendo of America
David Marshall
<!– $$NAS$$ –>
Having a social responsibility policy is great, but it is no where near enough. As we learned with pushing universities and colleges to force their suppliers to produce trademarked apparel in factories that respect workers as human beings requires inspection and enforcement, not just a policy document. That’s what we need to hold our electronics companies to.
Young workers have enormous buying power. Imagine if all of those young people waiting overnight outside an Apple store to buy the iPad or iPhone 4 just kept waiting until the products were guaranteed conflict-free. With events at the Foxconn factory in China where workers committed suicide over continuing to work in a sweatshop, Young Workers Movement called for a fair trade electronics monitoring system, similar to coffee. Ensuring that young workers are informed consumers is the first step towards international solidarity.
Young transport workers are urging the ITF Congress to formally recognise them as a fully fledged part of the ITF’s structures. Formal recognition within the ITF constitution would give the young workers – representing the under-35s – similar status as the ITF women transport workers’ committee.
