Ah, New Student Week — I remember it well. Aimlessly roaming from party to party, buying every book for every class and getting those lame free T-shirts. But before you current freshmen don your new shirts, check the tag and see where it’s made. Like most Northwestern apparel, it was probably made overseas — in a sweatshop.
During my time at NU, I’ve heard a lot about student opposition to the university’s apparel-licensing agreements with manufacturers that use sweatshop labor. Usually the objections center around sweatshops’ disregard for human rights and environmental concerns. Although those are genuine causes for outrage, often overlooked is the staggering amount of U.S. apparel jobs lost to cheap labor overseas — jobs that build this country’s backbone: the middle class.
I know it’s early in the academic year for tons of stats, but bear with me here — they don’t lie. According to the union of textile and apparel workers, UNITE, the industry has cut 825,600 American jobs between December 1994 and August 2003. This loss has accounted for an astonishing 53 percent of the total workforce. Compare this with reports from December 1990 to December 1994 where the industry only lost 43,500 jobs, a decline of less than 3 percent.
It’s hard to believe that in the early ’90s, when the country was mired in the Reagan-Bush Sr. recession, the industry lost fewer jobs than during the last nine years where, for the most part, America enjoyed the largest economic expansion since World War II.
The answer? Free trade agreements of the mid- and late-90s gave companies the ability to close shop in America and exploit cheap labor overseas, UNITE’s chief economist Mark Levinson told me.
“These agreements don’t protect (foreign) workers’ rights to unionize and improve their standards of living,” he said. Workers often face stiff reprisals (pay cuts, layoffs, even beatings) if they even try, while their governments look the other way.
All manufacturing industries have felt the effects of free trade, but apparel workers have been hit hardest. Needing little heavy machinery, it’s a pretty mobile industry and the workforce doesn’t have to be very skilled. Moreover, these trade deals do nothing to limit U.S. imports from countries that use sweatshops.
As apparel jobs continue to disappear from this country, NU needs to take stock of its own licensing agreements. One of the administration’s top priorities this fall should be implementing Associated Student Government’s plan made in May for a campus-wide labor review board to keep tabs on who we’re doing business with.
Over the summer, there was a great show on HBO called “The Wire” where a union leader mourns the loss of manufacturing jobs and the decay of the middle class: “We used to build shit in this country, used to make shit. Now we just stick our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”
Think about that the next time you stick your hands in the pockets of your new NU sweatpants.
