United Students Against Sweatshops
"...our universities and colleges are complicit in the sweatshop system..."
Description
USAS is a coalition of students from colleges and universities committed to the enforcement of Codes of Conduct at colleges and universities that protect, respect and favor not only the workers that compose the institution, but also promote social justice both locally and globally. Currently, 200 colleges and universities are affiliated with USAS.
Mission
Relevance
History
Current Activities
USAS began their activism focusing on sweatshop conditions in factories outsourced by the Apparel Industry. As the movement started growing, USAS created the Workers Rights Consortium, which provided an alternative to available codes of conducts and their ficticious implementation. It also provided an alternative to the model of the FLA, which was based in "voluntary campus monitoring". As the WRC became bigger and bigger, USAS turned their eye to their own campuses, where workers were employed at conditions that seem highly unfair. This was the beginning of the "Living Wage Campaigns", which have succesfully achieved important improvement in the working conditions of workers in colleges and universities. Nowadays, USAS is starting to focus on Coca-Cola and its relation not only to unfair labor condition but to certain human rights violations both in Latin America and in Asia.
