A battle won against sweatshops

Recently, you did a report on UA baseball caps that were sold in the bookstore that were made under notoriously bad labor conditions in the Dominican Republic. The report stated that these caps were removed from the shelves due to a petition signed by over 200 UA students at a rally we had in October; a recent check by one of our members confirmed that indeed, the caps are no longer sold at our bookstore. On behalf of Students Against Sweatshops, we would like to thank the entire UA community for taking part in this extremely successful action to cut our ties with companies that use sweatshop labor.

Although this campaign was successful, much remains to change at the university. We still do business with other companies with notorious labor practices, such as Nike and others we are currently looking into.

While we appreciate the action students, faculty and staff took in signing our petitions, we entreat you all to keep your eye out for companies at the UA that do not treat their workers fairly. For example, we recently learned that Nike's workers in El Salvador are frequently beaten and forced to work overtime. The administration, despite our letters and complaints, has yet to make a response to this violation of the Nike contract.

Part of the reason our administration does so little on the issue of labor violations is because we continue to participate in weak codes of conduct such as the one recently protested by a student sit-in in the President's Office at Duke.

These need to be improved to require companies to release the locations of their overseas factories so they can be monitored. Thank you all again.

Molly Snow

Psychology and speech and hearing sciences junior