Don’t sweat it

Say, do you know where that cute outfit you have on was made? I didn’t think so. Unless you’re wearing a barrel with leather straps, your clothes were probably made overseas by desperately poor people whose wages came to less than 1 percent of the price you paid. Even if you bought them at Goodwill.\nYes, sweatshops. Folks like to say that no one is forced to work in sweatshops, that the exploited and abused workers take the jobs because they’re better than anything else to be had in their country. Well, that’s not saying much. The Third World has been in dire economic straits for many years, but that’s no reason to take advantage of these people. \nNoSweat! is IU-Bloomington’s economic justice organization, with a tradition of fighting for the rights of the people who make our clothing going back to 1999, when the group started as an arm of the local Jobs with Justice chapter. No Sweat!’s longest tradition is in education – trying to bring the dark realities of the global economy to the awareness of IU students. A typical recent example is Wal-Mart’s embarrassment this past holiday season when it was forced to open an investigation into a Chinese factory supplying it with Christmas ornaments. The National Labor Committee had discovered that the factory manufacturing our Christmas whimsey, the Guangzhou Huangya Gift Company, paid its destitute workers less than the legal Chinese minimum wage of 55 cents per hour, among other serious problems. Consider yourself educated.\nNo Sweat! also campaigns for reform of IU policy. One milestone was reached in March 2000, when IU finally agreed to join the Workers Rights Consortium, an independent labor conditions monitoring group. No Sweat! had campaigned for this goal for months, on the grounds that the first step to labor reform was effective monitoring labor conditions. The Workers Rights Consortium provides for independent monitoring of the conditions in factories making IU apparel. \nThe goal is for IU students, faculty, staff and alumni to be proud of wearing IU attire with the knowledge that the people who made it received some reasonable compensation and didn’t produce it under the grueling conditions for which sweatshop labor is known.\nCurrently, No Sweat! is engaged in a campaign to end Coca-Cola’s monopoly on soft drink distribution on campus. This is because of Coke’s horrible human rights record, primarily at its bottling operations in Colombia, as reported by Amnesty International and other independent monitors. Coke has a long and bloody history in its world labor practices and doesn’t deserve its privileged position on the IU campus.\nNo Sweat! meets at 8 p.m. on Mondays in Ballantine Hall, room 018. All are welcome, and some fun plans are in place for the coming term. So stop on by – a Pacific-basin textile worker will thank you, and so will your conscience.