Spring Break
Groups rally for WRC support
Alvin M. Morgan, Daily Staff Writer
The messages were brought to the walkway just outside of the bookstore by two advocacy groups, Students for Justice and the United Students Against Sweatshops.
The goal of the protest, or teach-in, was to rally the support of the students in an effort to convince San Jose State University President Robert Caret to sever the university's ties with the Fair Labor Association and join forces with the Workers Rights Consortium.
The consortium is an independent monitoring firm that inspects supplier's factories of companies licensed to produce university apparel.
According to Dale Weaver, a third-year graduate student majoring in history and a representative of Students for Justice, corporations dominate the Fair Labor Association.
He said that the association's existence is a cover for corporation's unfair labor practices.
Conversely, according to Weaver, 94 universities are currently aligned with the Workers Rights Consortium, including four Bay Area schools. The universities of California at Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Berkeley, as well as San Francisco State University all endorse the consortium.
Weaver also said that the Fair Labor Association does not honestly monitor apparel companies like the New Era Cap Company, who makes caps for many organizations such as Major League Baseball, the Professional Golf Association, as well as many universities including SJSU.
The New Era Cap Company has recently been named to the official boycott list of the AFL-CIO.
"We carry caps from many different companies. The caps made by New Era are a very small piece of inventory. The only reason we carry them is because it is the official cap of the San Jose State baseball team," said Court Warren, director of Spartan Bookstore.
"They (United Students Against Sweatshops) didn't provide any information to me that would suggest that anything wrong is going on," Warren added.
In order to make their point clear, the United Students Against Sweatshops invited guest speaker Christine Wattie to testify to her first-hand knowledge of the alleged unfair labor practices being committed at the New Era Cap Company plant in which she is employed.
According to Wattie, a 14-year employee of New Era's Derby, NY plant, New Era is subcontracting work out to many different countries including China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Korea.
Wattie and the members of her workers union, Communications Workers of America, which is based in Buffalo, NY, have been on strike since July.
"We have had workers from Bangladesh come up to our strike line to give us testimonial about the atrocities that they are faced with day in and day out," Wattie said.
According to Wattie, the workers from Bangladesh are forced to endure 16-hour work days and paid from eight to 14 cents per hour and are refused time off when they are ill.
"We just want to make the nation aware of the atrocities that are going on in these third world countries. It's not right. We want them to show some respect not only to the workers in America, but globally," Wattie said.
Wattie, during her five-minute, bullhorn-amplified speech, revealed that during her 14 years of service with the New Era Cap Company, she endured two hand surgeries and two back surgeries as a result of the unsafe working conditions.
Despite being confronted by the university police and having his bullhorn confiscated for not obtaining a permit to use amplified sound on campus, Weaver seemed determined to continue his speech.
"I want to see President Caret join the WRC (Workers Rights Consortium) and I would like to see him come out of the FLA (Fair Labor Association) if you lend support to a bad organization like them, you're being a part of the problem. I don't want us to be a part of the problem," Weaver said.
