FLA director joins forum on apparel, labor

Claire Urban, left, former president of Cornell Students Against Sweatshops, speaks with Sam Brown, executive director of the Fair Labor Association, following a campus forum in Ives Hall March 13. Charles Harrington/University Photography

Two dozen people, mostly students, attended a March 13 public forum in Ives Hall on sweatshop labor and the production of collegiate apparel. Included in the forum was Sam Brown, a human-rights activist who is the first executive director of the Fair Labor Association (FLA), a monitoring and enforcement organization that also includes manufacturers and nongovernmental organizations.

Cornell and more than 130 other colleges and universities belong to FLA, which Brown, who has been on the job for about one month, described as a "work in progress" because the organization is still developing mechanisms for monitoring factories where collegiate products are manufactured. He said monitoring capabilities are an important first step in a process that is "central and essential" to the success of FLA.

"By this time next year," Brown said, "we expect to have substantial monitoring experience under our belts," which he said would help FLA fix problems that exist in the apparel business.

Cornell, which has maintained a leadership role in the development of a collegiate code of conduct, was one of the first campuses to support full, public disclosure of factory locations where apparel bearing Cornell names and images is produced.

Cornell has shared with Cornell Students Against Sweatshops (SAS) a list of factory locations for more than 115 Cornell licensees. The 94-page report was gathered through the efforts of the university's licensing agent, the Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC). The list includes information about factory locations from large corporations such as Champion to smaller, less-well-known firms.

SAS and Cornell administrators have been meeting regularly to exchange ideas and to provide support for their shared objective, the elimination of sweatshops. They also have worked jointly on a comparison of the merits of the FLA and the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) and their approaches to factory monitoring and inspection.

The forum was an opportunity to learn more about organizations involved in the anti-sweatshop movement and requirements affecting companies licensed to produce collegiate apparel. Another forum featuring a representative of the WRC is being scheduled.