Sometimes amidst the chaos of midterms, midnight coffee runs, Darnall delicacies, rainbows of posters tacked to every corner of campus and screaming, intoxicated students hanging perilously from the rooftop of Village A, I ask myself: “What exactly am I doing here?”
I think I know the answer; in fact, I think we all know the answer. We just happen to forget every now and then. We are here to get an education. Why is it that an education is so important? Well, the most I can gather from professors, advisors and various other mentors is that the goal of our education is to make us better citizens. That is, we study philosophy, mathematics, Spanish or economics so that we can better understand the world around us and begin to make positive contributions.
What then do we, as Georgetown students, do when we learn that our very own University is contributing negatively to the rest of the world? This is precisely the question that Georgetown students were faced with five years ago when they learned that we were putting our name and logo on products sold worldwide that were made using sweatshop labor. Outraged, a group of students took over the President’s office for 84 hours, demanding that we clean up Georgetown’s name. As students, they were adamant that Georgetown would not contribute to the immoral treatment of other human beings.
Today the exploitation of workers in sweatshops across the globe has become a common practice for many corporations. Sweatshops where workers are subjected to dangerous and toxic working conditions, refused basic health care, forced to work overtime, paid less than a living wage and forbidden to unionize exist in many countries. Nike sells its shoes at $120 a pair, and all these less-developed countries see is the few coins the workers receive for making the shoes. These factories do not stimulate any less-developed economies, but rather provide cheap labor that really bolsters the economy of the United States.
Resulting from the sit-in was the creation of what is known today as the Licensing Oversight Committee. Along with three other students and several faculty members and administrators, I am a member of this committee. We review reports made by the Worker Rights Consortium on factories that make Georgetown apparel, and if a violation of the Code of Conduct happens to occur, we review the facts and act accordingly.
Thanks in part to the hard work of the LOC at Georgetown (and similar committees at several other universities), workers at the Kukdong factory in Mexico won several basic rights, including the right to organize and demand safe working conditions, health care and compensation for working overtime. The LOC addressed the situation by writing a letter to Nike (the major company using this factory), explaining to them that it was against Georgetown’s principles to contribute to the immoral treatment of factory workers. We requested that they reform and grant these workers the basic rights that no human should be denied. And they did.
As consumers, we often underestimate the amount of power we hold. In fact, corporations have already placed the power in our hands by making important decisions based on consumer demand and the market economics. The reason corporations have not curtailed their reliance upon sweatshop labor worldwide is due to the fact that very few consumers have made this request. Well, what are you waiting for? Tell Nike and the rest of corporate America that you will not tolerate their immoral practices. They’re listening.
Thanks to Georgetown’s position as a leader in the anti-sweatshop movement and the administation’s ardent support of the LOC, you have a tremendous amount of resources at your disposal. The LOC will hold a number of workshops on labor-related issues within the coming six months; ignorance will no longer be an excuse for apathy and inactivity amongst students. Additionally, you can begin by visiting several websites that contain a wealth of pertinent information, such as www.workersrights.org and United Students Against Sweatshops at www.usasnet.org.
Today we live in a truly global community and our actions and decisions can have far-reaching implications. When you purchase apparel manufactured with sweatshop labor, you are rewarding abusive corporations for exploiting human lives.
We are at Georgetown because we want to become better members of society?a global society?and the more we learn, the more questions with which we are presented. I hope that as a community here at Georgetown, we will work hard not only to educate ourselves on the different ways in which we impact our global community, but that we will act to positively change our world. And if we discover a corporation that undermines the very principles upon which we build our respect and admiration for humanity, we will cease to contribute to their immoral practices and fight for the rights that all humans should enjoy.
