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
- The abuse of sweatshop labor is among the most blatant examples of the excesses and exploitation of the global economy. We recognize, however, that the term “sweatshop” is not limited to the apparel industry as traditionally conceived; sweatshop conditions exist in the fields, in the prisons, on our campuses, in the power relations of a flawed system.
- Thus, we consider all struggles against the systemic problems of the global economy to be directly or by analogy a struggle against sweatshops. Whether a campus group focuses its energies on the apparel industry or on another form of sweatshop, agreement with the principles below will be used as the sole requisite for working under the name of United Students Against Sweatshops.
- (United Students Against Sweatshops, n.d.)
Relevance
History
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.
Current Activities
USAS has three major ongoing campaigns nowadays in the United States:
Sweat-Free Campus Campaign
Ethical Contracting Campaign
The most important focus of this campaign is to "kick out" Coca-Cola from college and university campuses in the United States, because of the relationship of this brand with Human Rights Violations in Colombia and Environmental Devastation in India.
This campaign has successfully achieved terminating Coca-Cola contracts with NYU, Rutgers NYU and Hofstra universities.
For more information on this campaign, follow these links:
Stop Killer Coke at USAS!
Student Activism at KillerCoke.org
