The true March Madness is the sweatshop conditions under which college clothing is manufactured. While college basketball was at the center of the sporting world's attention, fans across the country followed the games, cheered for their favorite teams and donned their favorite college T-shirt.
Unfortunately, as the games were dissected and analyzed from every angle, a much more important story was hardly mentioned. While most consumers know who plays point guard for their favorite team, very few of them are aware of what is happening in the factories where college apparel is produced.
Tens of thousands of workers in many countries work in factories that produce college apparel, and most earn poverty wages, are required to work extremely long hours and work in unsafe conditions. Major brands like Nike, Adidas and Reebok hold the licenses to market college apparel, and they use contractor factories to manufacture the product. Intense competition pushes these contractors to offer the absolute lowest price, forcing factory managers to keep wages as low as possible rather than pay the extra couple of cents per T-shirt that it would cost to respect the rights of workers.
The result is that, across the board, university clothes are made in factories where workers are not receiving anywhere near enough to support themselves or their families. According to research published by the Worker Rights Consortium, wages in key apparel producing countries would need to be doubled or tripled to cover the cost of basic needs like food, clothing, housing and health care. For the American consumer, however, this would add less than a dollar to the cost of a $35 sweatshirt.
Brands need permission to use university names and logos, a relationship which gives the university community a great deal of power to help ensure that the workers producing their apparel have decent working conditions.
Anyone who goes to college, sends his or her kids to college, works for a college, or roots for a college sports team can significantly improve the lives of tens of thousands of garment workers - at little cost to American consumers - by urging college presidents to change this system.
College students already have been taking action on this issue. For the past 10 years, students on university campuses across the United States and Canada have been demanding that universities hold the brands accountable for these sweatshop conditions.
Students and universities have forced these brands to disclose where their factories are located, to agree to a set of better standards for their factories and to open up their factories to investigation by independent monitoring organizations like the Worker Rights Consortium. Unfortunately, due to the brands' unwillingness to take these obligations seriously, clothes are still produced in sweatshops.
It is for this reason that United Students Against Sweatshops proposed, in 2005, that universities adopt a policy called the Designated Suppliers Program (DSP), which would require that university licensees source their apparel from factories where workers have the right to form a union and where they earn enough to support a family. In addition, the DSP would require these brands to pay a fair price for their goods in order to ensure that factories are receiving enough money to respect the rights of their workers. To date, this is the only program that has been proposed that would truly address the college apparel sweatshop problem. It is a necessary step for all universities that are truly committed to the enforcement of basic workers' rights in their apparel supply chain.
So far, only 40 major universities have endorsed the principles of the DSP and have committed to working toward its implementation. Only nine of the colleges that were represented in the men's NCAA Division I tournament have committed to holding their licensees to this higher standard.
Whether or not your college had a stake in this year's tournament, it is critical that college presidents commit to this program. As institutions that care about more than just the bottom line, colleges have a moral obligation to use their power to make a positive difference in the world.
Students have presented the university community with an opportunity to take a leadership role in the global struggle for dignity and respect for workers. Expressing public support and commitment to the DSP costs a university nothing, but it promises to make a tremendous difference in the lives of those who produce your favorite t-shirt.
Eric Sharfstein
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