Like most of the UH student body, members of Students Against Sweatshops spent the summer working, vacationing or picking up a few credits, but we also continued our campaign to get the administration to stop using sweatshops to produce UH logo clothes.
Here's a quick review of the issue: the Student Government Association Senate unanimously passed a bill in the first meeting of last spring that called for the University to affiliate with the Worker Rights Consortium, a third party independent labor monitoring organization run by students and administrators. As of August, 181 universities were affiliated with the WRC. The SGA bill also mandated signing the Designated Suppliers Program, ensuring that factories producing collegiate apparel meet minimum health and safety conditions and that workers get paid a living wage and have the right to organize. On April 14 the bill passed through the University's shared governance system and was forwarded to President Renu Khator for action.
More than four months have passed, but Khator has not addressed the shared governance decision concerning sweatshop use. While this was going on, we invited Khator to our speaker events to hear what garment workers had to say.
In March, before shared governance had run its course, Khator obscured the UH democratic structure by setting up an "apparel task force" of five unelected faculty members, a staffer and a student. Khator made sure to set the deadline for their recommendation in the middle of the summer, when most students are gone. Obviously, an appointed body is not democratic, especially when compared to our shared governance system, which is made up of elected faculty, staff and students. To add insult to injury, Khator conveniently appointed no faculty to the task force who had actually published in any field relevant to sweatshops, labor, globalization or social responsibility. UH has many faculty members who have decades of experience and have been published in those fields.
The task force, chaired by economics professor Steven Craig, invited us to give a presentation. To complicate things, Craig scheduled our presentation after The Daily Cougar stopped publishing for the spring semester. When the task force released its page-and-a-half report in July, it had no sources, methodology or anything else scholarly in it.
In the report, the task force claimed we said the DSP would not have any effect on the collegiate apparel industry. This falsehood was signed by Craig and endorsed by his committee, despite the fact that the goal of our campaign is for UH to sign the DSP. The videotape of our presentation, which is posted on YouTube, clearly shows that our solution is the DSP. When we asked task force members to retract their misrepresentations they refused.
Khator issued a statement accepting the task force recommendation to join the Fair Labor Association, which is actually just a front for corporations, according to www.flawatch.org.
Even though her task force also recommended affiliating with the WRC, Khator claimed she would ask the Vice President for Legal Affairs and General Counsel Dona Cornell, to consult the Texas attorney general for a reason not to join. A week later we contacted Cornell, who admitted she had already been in contact with the attorney general. When we asked Cornell when she would inform Khator of the attorney general's answer, she refused to reply on the topic. Cornell then admitted to not asking the attorney general for a legal opinion letter about joining the WRC. It's obvious that joining the WRC is not illegal, and that is why Khator and Cornell are concealing the attorney general's advice.
In the meantime, UH apparel workers are still being abused and the University is doing nothing to protect them. This brings about the question why hundreds of thousands of our tuition dollars are spent on shared governance when this resource of differing opinions is not utilized. How can UH claim to be democratic when one person makes policy decisions by ignoring the structure of shared governance?
Laws, a sociology freshman, can be reached via opinion@thedailycougar.com
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