City urged to join anti-sweatshop coalition
October 24, 2008 The Ithaca Journal
Student groups concerned about workers who make uniforms
By Krisy Gashler, Staff Writer
ITHACA — The City of Ithaca should ensure that its employees' uniforms aren't coming from sweatshops, a group of Cornell students say.
Cornell Students Against Sweatshops and the Cornell Organization for Labor Action are petitioning Ithaca's Common Council to join a coalition of municipalities across the country that have pledged to ensure that public tax dollars are not being spent to support factories that exploit and endanger workers.
"It's about transparency," said Andrew Wolf, president of Cornell Students Against Sweatshops. "It's about taxpayers being able to know where their money's getting spent and making sure that it's not supporting practices that are essentially illegal — in our country they're illegal."
Some of those practices include child labor, requiring 12-hour days six to seven days a week with no overtime pay, and requiring female employees to submit to pregnancy tests and firing them if they are found to be pregnant, Wolf said.
More than 180 municipalities across the country have signed onto the Local and Government Sweat-free Consortium, an organization designed to pool municipal purchasing power in order to hire factory inspectors and ensure that tax dollars are not going to sweatshops.
The state governments of Vermont, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California and Illinois have all signed on, and New York state is very close, Wolf said.
The cost for Ithaca to join the sweat-free consortium would be between $1,000 to $5,000, and annual dues would equal 1 percent of apparel procurement costs for the City of Ithaca, according to an information packet submitted to Common Council's Community and Organizational Issues committee.
Adrien Dumoulin-Smith, treasurer of Cornell Students Against Sweatshops, told the committee this week that the independent monitors who will be hired by the consortium will help "prevent the downward spiral we've seen in labor standards."
By failing to ensure that factories are following fair labor standards, government purchasers are implicitly rewarding factories that don't, Dumoulin-Smith said.
Wolf and Dumoulin-Smith both referenced the similarities between the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, which was a catalyst in enacting worker safety legislation in the United States, and a factory fire at KTS Textile in Bangladesh.
KTS Textile made clothes for a large correctional facility in the United States. The factory burned down, killing and injuring 300 workers, mostly young women, who were trapped inside the locked building.
A policy statement supporting Ithaca's membership in the consortium could come to a vote at next month's community committee, 7:30 p.m. Nov. 18 in City Hall, 108 E. Green St.
10/24/08-- Correction by SweatFree Communities: Over 180 public entities nationally have adopted resolutions or policies in support of sweatfree purchasing. Now these entities are starting to join the State and Local Government Sweatfree Consortium -- a new collective mechanism to enforce sweatfree purchasing policies. Members so far include Pennsylania; Berkeley, California; Lucas County, Ohio; and Portland, Oregon. Many others have expressed interest and SweatFree Communities expects that others will be joining soon.
