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Students protest against use of sweatshop labor

Several Cal State Long Beach students are working alongside the Campus Progressives and the Sociology Students Association to form a campaign against the use of sweatshops.

One focus of the campaign will be targeted toward the 49er Shops, as well as any vendor that CSULB permits to sell items on campus.

“We are not necessarily making the claim that the 49er stores and any vendors on campus sell products from sweatshops, but we believe that the locations, working conditions and wages of the distributors are questionable,” said Sean Brandlin, a graduate of CSULB and a Campus Progressives member who is working on the campaign. “We are asking the shops and vendors to disclose to the student body the locations, as well as the working conditions of the factories that produce their products. We would like this information to be accessible at anytime.”

The Campus Progressives said they will help with the cause. They are a group of students who describe themselves as “dedicated to promoting political, cultural and social awareness on campus through education, demonstration, art, and action,” according to their Web site. Brandlin, along with senior sociology major Annette Quintero and several other students, will work with the Campus Progressives to hold outreach events to involve the CSULB community, and create more awareness of sweatshops.

“Part of our cause is to have students take more control,” said Quintero. “We as students should decide what is sold on our campus.”

“Most workers in sweatshops make less than $5 per day,” Brandlin said. “In most cases the money you spend on an item produced in a sweatshop will never make it to the hands of the person who physically produced it.”

Don Penrod, the general manager of the 49er shops, said he has no knowledge of any sweatshop used by distributors to the 49er stores.

“We are a member of both the Fair Labor Association and the Worker’s Rights Consortium and we do not believe we are buying through sweatshops,” Penrod said.

The FLA and WRC work with companies and universities to monitor the factories companies buy through.

The WRC works with colleges and universities only. It is a non-profit organization whose “purpose is to assist in the enforcement of manufacturing codes of conduct adopted by colleges and universities; these codes are designed to ensure that factories producing clothing and other goods bearing college and university names respect the basic rights of workers.”

The FLA works with universities as well as companies, according to their Web site. The FLA helps “establish an internal system of monitoring factory conditions and promoting respect for the code standards.”

The 49er Shops look to these organizations to monitor their distributors. “If a company the 49er shops bought from used sweatshops, we would hope the FLA and WRC would police them,” Penrod said. “If we knew for a fact that a company was violating standards we would encourage them to do better,” he said.

“If we could not resolve the situation, we would consider a boycott.”

In regards to sweatshops Penrod said, “Probably any job is better than no job.”

The campaign against sweatshops will go further than the 49er stores. The students involved are also concerned with sweatshops throughout the world.

“These workers could not afford the products they produce,” Quintero said. “There are alternatives to buying a T-shirt that was produced by a sweatshop worker. You can find one for the same price as Nordstrom or Gap that was not made in a sweatshop.”

The Sociology Students Association (SSA) will also get involved by informing the sociology community at CSULB on the issue of sweatshops.

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