Consortium hires director
By Vanessa Renderman
Special Projects Editor
 With
the hiring of its first executive director, the Worker Rights Consortium
is inching closer to the goal of investigating apparel-producing factories
to ensure they are abiding by a set code of conduct.
In December, board members of the Worker Rights
Consortium, which is still in its growing stages, chose Scott Nova as
the executive director of the organization.
The consortium is designed to monitor labor conditions
in factories around the world and report all violations to its members.
Sixty-eight universities are members of the consortium; Purdue is one
of them.
"I think the WRC is continuing to develop as expected,
as outlined, as predicted," said Negin Almassi, member of Purdue Students
Against Sweatshops. "We're really excited that the WRC continues to
develop in a way that will be beneficial to all of the schools and all
of the workers."
Purdue Students Against Sweatshops urged the University
to join the consortium last year through meetings, protests and a hunger
strike. In October, Purdue president Martin Jischke decided Purdue would
hold dual membership — one with the Worker Rights Consortium and
one with the Fair Labor Association, another factory monitoring agency.
And now that an executive director is in place,
the next step for the consortium is to locate code-violating apparel
manufacturers and make recommendations to consortium members on how
to handle the problem.
Nova said the crucial goal right now is to move
the organization forward. "The public has been largely unaware of the
(factory) condition," he said. "The solution is to shed light where
once there was darkness."
The method the consortium will use to find code
violations will be face-to-face discussion with factory workers and
non-governmental organizations near the factories.
"These are the organizations that know local conditions,"
Nova said. "They are essential to helping us produce accurate results."
Nova's role as executive director will be to carry
out the board's decision. Five of the board members are student representatives
— one of whom is a Purdue student. Nova says the board’s job
is to link communication between the consortium and the broad student
community.
The student community plays an important role on
the board because the consortium focuses on university apparel. Nova
said that although university clothing makes up no more than two percent
of overall global apparel, its influence is strong. He referred to it
as a "prestige market."
If a college sports team was to wear a brand name
that is linked to sweatshop working conditions, it can draw national
attention and hurt the company. "There's no question that collegiate
apparel is being produced in sweatshop conditions," Nova said.
When universities join the consortium, they agree
to disclose the factory locations. This will help the Worker Rights
Consortium find the factories in underdeveloped countries and even in
the United States in order to investigate them.
Factory locations used to be considered a trade
secret that could not be violated, Nova said. But now that universities
are demanding that its licensees give them locations, the secret is
out in the open.
"Disclosure is indicative of the power colleges
and universities have," Nova said. "This battle over the future of globalization
is the most important debate in this country."
It will be a few months before the WRC staff can
begin making trips to factories for inspection, as it is still in its
beginning stages.
In the meantime, Purdue Students Against Sweatshops
plans to continue educating people on campus about sweatshop conditions
such as long hours, poor wages, lack of women's rights and use of child
labor.
The group will host two speakers at the end of
February and will put on a workshop during the annual Holocaust Remembrance
Conference in the spring.
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