United Students Against Sweatshops

United Students Against Sweatshops

Members of United Students Against Sweatshops march outside the offices of Russell Corporation in Atlanta GA, during a protest against Russell's worker rights violations at its Honduras factories.
Abbreviation USAS (pronounced "you-sass")
Formation 1998[1]
Type Student activist organization
Purpose To work in solidarity with working peoples' struggles; to struggle against racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and other forms of oppression within our society, within our organizations, and within ourselves; to build a grassroots student movement that challenges corporate power and that fights for economic justice; and to strive to act democratically.
Location
  • North America
Website usas.org

United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) is a student organization founded in 1998 with chapters at over 250 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. In April 2000, USAS founded the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent monitoring organization that investigates labor conditions in factories that produce collegiate apparel all over the world. The WRC exacts an annual membership fee from participating universities, which is used to fund its monitoring work.

The WRC works with NGOs, human rights groups, and local labor unions or federations, in countries where collegiate apparel is produced. At present over 180 universities and colleges have affiliated with the WRC. USAS is also proposing that universities sign on to the Designated Suppliers Program, or DSP, which would act to source collegiate apparel from factories that respect workers' rights to form unions and be paid living wages.

In 2000, Nike and other major clothing corporations renamed the Apparel Industry Partnership (AIP) the Fair Labor Association (FLA), in large part to compete with the WRC. The AIP, an initiative of the Clinton Administration, had become a discredited organization, because all non-profit organizations and unions that had initially supported it, withdrew from it, with the exception of the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF), who subsequently withdrew their institutional membership on the FLA Board soon afterwards.

United Students Against Sweatshops is widely viewed as the largest anti-sweatshop community group in the United States and Canada. It was formed in 1997 as part of a broader anti-sweatshop movement increasingly popular in North America. This movement exhibited a great degree of skepticism of free trade practices, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the proposed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA).

Focusing on domestic as well as international sweatshops, the group has built coalitions of students, labor groups, workers, and community members that focus on a range of campaigns:

See also

References

  1. ↑ Kimura-Walsh, Erin; Walter R. Allen (2008). "Globalization from above, globalization from below: Mechanisms for social disparity and social justice in higher education". 6: 201–230. doi:10.1016/S1479-358X(08)06008-7. ISSN 1479-358X.
  2. ↑ Brand Responsibility Project Records 2004-2012.0.84 cubic feet (2 boxes) of textual materials plus 83.8 GB of digital files.
  3. ↑ Mahoney, Jack (2008-03-13). "TOS Workers' Protest Hanes Boardmember Jessica Matthews". Georgetown Solidarity Committee. Archived from the original on August 20, 2008. Retrieved 2008-03-15.
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