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Students Advocating Change Host Sweatshop Awareness Week Students Advocating Change (SAC), a student group committed to helping alleviate social injustice in the world, held a Sweatshop Awareness Week on campus from April 3–7, 2006. SAC began putting together events for the week in January, when the idea to host such a program was first addressed at the Spare Change Retreat. The week was highlighted by a visit from sociologist and sweatshop expert Robert J.S. Ross, who presented a lecture entitled, “Slaves to Fashion: Sweatshops in Global Context,” on April 4. Ross has been a professor of Sociology at Clark University since 1972. He is the author of Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops, a provocative and accessible history of the sweatshop. A 20-minute highlight segment of the film The High Cost of Low Price, was shown multiple times in the Hagan Campus Center Hall on April 6. Directed by Robert Greenwald, this documentary examines the impact of the retail giant Wal-Mart on local communities. According to the film, Wal-Mart, the largest corporation in the world, has forced most of its work overseas and uses hundreds of thousands of sweatshop workers in order to keep low prices. Those in attendance at the screening had the opportunity to sign letters petitioning for better conditions for the sweatshop workers Wal-Mart uses overseas. These letters will be sent to Lee Scott, CEO of Wal-Mart. The week concluded with a “Sweatshop Representation” in Charlie’s on April 7. Students from SAC posed as sweatshop workers who were given the task of making and assembling bracelets and necklaces (pictured above left). The students sat at a table under a sign that read “No one is allowed to get water or go to the bathroom during work time,” and were not allowed to talk to each other while making the jewelry. “It is important for college students to be educated about sweatshops because they affect us,” said Jaclyn Sargent ’08, co-director of SAC. “I think a lot of people are unaware of the conditions in sweatshops and don’t realize that some of the clothes they wear are made there. Sweatshops also go against our values as a Catholic institution, where basic human dignity is very important.” The goal of the week was to raise the awareness of students in regards to how sweatshops treat their workers and the affect that sweatshops have on the daily lives of everyone. SAC says that people can fight sweatshops by avoiding companies who have poor human rights records and to shop with responsible companies that treat their workers with dignity and pay a living wage.
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April, 2006 - Imagine working in an environment where you made poverty wages and were not allowed to talk or take breaks to use the bathroom or get a drink of water. These brutal conditions are everyday realities for sweatshop workers across the world and students at Assumption College have taken notice.