Goergetown Solidarity Committee, in conjunction with the local head of the NAACP, called on Georgetown University to terminate its contract with New Era Cap, which produces caps for universities across the country, in addition to being the exclusive producer of Major League Baseball caps, on Tuesday. Solidarity’s demand followed the NAACP’s release of a report in which approximately 50 anonymous employees filed allegations of racial and sexual discrimination at New Era’s plant in Mobile, Alabama.
Speaking to students in ICC 108 on Tuesday, Shelton expressed confidence in Georgetown’s ability to affect the working conditions in New Era’s Mobile plant by boycotting its products in the book store.
“We’ve found that if a company knows that students are buying selectively with a conscience, it can be a very helpful tool to pressure them into making changes,” he said.
In the NAACP report, employees said that after workers started to communicate with members of the Teamster Union, the plant managers launched a campaign insisting that workers would lose their food stamps if they unionized. According to Shelton, the management also stripped some workrooms of their chairs.
“It certainly wasn’t more efficient,” Shelton said. “Just petty.”
The report also describes the plant’s “point system,” in which an employee is given a point when he or she misses work, and seven points result in termination. The points are ostensibly in place to deter unexcused employee absence, but the report alleges that it is a system that management uses to punishe certain workers.
“One day I left work because my house was burning down,” an anonymous worker said in the report. “I came in and showed them a letter from the fire department. They pointed me.”
Georgetown is awaiting an assessment from the University’s Licensing Oversight Committee before deciding whether or not to renew its New Era contract. Without renewal, the contract will expire on June 1st.
“The LOC is actively monitoring the situation related to the Alabama factory and investigating what is taking place there … to make an informed decision about any possible Georgetown action related to our licensing agreement,” University Spokeswoman Julie Green Bataille said. The LOC has still not made any formal recommendation to the administration.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison terminated its New Era contract in January after student groups brought the Alabama plant’s abuse of employees to the attention of school administrators. The plant hires almost exclusively temporary workers and pays them a yearly salary that places them an average of $4,000 below the poverty line.
