Showing posts with label USAS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label USAS. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

A Big Win For Team USAS, A Bigger Win For Workers

The New York Times reports this evening on some big news on the anti-sweatshop front.
The anti-sweatshop movement at dozens of American universities, from Georgetown to U.C.L.A., has had plenty of idealism and energy, but not many victories.

Until now.

The often raucous student movement announced on Tuesday that it had achieved its biggest victory by far. Its pressure tactics persuaded one of the nation’s leading sportswear companies, Russell Athletic, to agree to rehire 1,200 workers in Honduras who lost their jobs when Russell closed their factory soon after the workers had unionized.

From the time Russell shut the factory last January, the anti-sweatshop coalition orchestrated a nationwide campaign against the company. Most important, the coalition, United Students Against Sweatshops, persuaded the administrations of Boston College, Columbia, Harvard, New York University, Stanford, Michigan, North Carolina and 89 other colleges and universities to sever or suspend their licensing agreements with Russell. The agreements — some yielding more than $1 million in sales — allowed Russell to put university logos on T-shirts, sweatshirts and fleeces.

This might explain today's meeting between Graham and USAS that Onward State reported on yesterday. Graham likes to associate himself with a winner, afterall.

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Monday, October 12, 2009

A Couple of Items on the Labor Front

First, Fritz Fitz, a longtime reader of this blog and sometime commenter, sent along word this morning that the United Students Against Sweatshops will be holding at teaching-in on the Employee Free Choice Act this upcoming Thursday, October 15, at 7pm in 160 Willard on the Penn State University Park campus. Speakers will include a representative of the AFL-CIO and  Paul Whitehead  a Penn State Labor Law professor.

Also, there was news today about the AAUP pushing back against complaints lodged by the right wing Landmark Legal Foundation against  academic labor centers around the country which conduct research about and offer programs for unions .

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