Redress your campus
Since the Fairtrade Universities Scheme started in 2003, students across the UK have made great progress in getting their universities and colleges to commit to buying fairly traded products. Yet the branded clothing and staff uniforms of the very same institutions may have been made by workers who are paid poverty wages and denied the right to unionise to improve their conditions.
It’s time to redress our campuses.
Taking the first steps
P&Pers in Southampton, York and Warwick have already been working on anti-sweatshop campaigns and have successfully passed policy to ensure that clothes sold and used by their universities are sweat-free. You can too!
York P&P win anti-sweatshop victory!
After over a year of campaigning York University P&P succeeded in getting their Students’ Union to purchase only sweat-free clothing in March 2007.
York People & Planet group mounted an Ethical Merchandise campaign to get colleges, clubs and societies to stand up and reject sweatshop labour with the aim of making York a sweat-free campus. They raised awareness with talks from prominent speakers, articles in the student papers, and created an Ethical Merchandising Guide.
York’s campaign poster to stop the buying of sweatshop made clothing at their SU
This year the group focused on getting a Students’ Union motion passed at their Union General Meeting (UGM) by running a poster campaign focusing on the fact that T-shirts for a RAG (Raise and Give) charity bar crawl were from Fruit of the Loom, which has been condemned for its disgraceful labour conditions. They also flyered the computer rooms during voting week, telling students to VOTE NOW on the UGM motion.
Finally, they got their Students’ Union to pass an anti-sweatshops policy.
Ric from York commented:
“The main crux of it is that the SU now has to buy from companies WE recommend. RAG recently purchased over 1000 t-shirts from Fruit of the Loom and we wanted that kind of irony to stop. We had a rough ride with the SU… but we have now won the battle. A win for Fairtrade Fortnight!”
Nina, the campaign co-ordinator added:
“Our motion was one of only two motions that got passed at the UGM, so clearly raising awareness paid off. We’re extremely happy this motion finally got through - it will mean that the Students’ Union has to source its merchandise from ethical suppliers, as well as having raised the profile of the issue of sweatshops on campus.”