ABSTRACT
In 2005, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), a U.S. nonprofit labor-rights-monitoring organization founded by student anti-sweatshop activists and universities that maintain licensing agreements with sportswear-apparel brands, proposed a system by which licensees would be expected to enforce enhanced labor standards in the production of university-logo apparel and to pay prices to their suppliers sufficient to make compliance feasible. This initiative—known as the Designated Suppliers Program, or DSP—has been endorsed by several major U.S. universities and colleges; however, stiff opposition from the apparel industry and other obstacles have prevented the program’s implementation. Recently, however, one apparel brand, Knights Apparel, working with a former sportswear-apparel factory in Villa Altagracia in the Dominican Republic, has launched the Alta Gracia brand of T-shirts and sweatshirts. This brand, designed for the U.S. collegiate market, embraces key principles of the DSP. Workers have a union and are paid a ‘living wage’ three times above the national minimum wage for the industry. Knights Apparel ensures that the factory is in an economic position to pay the living wage, meet all other labor standards, and employ workers fulltime, year-round. The factory’s labor conditions are integral to the marketing of the products, which bear hang tags explaining the meaning of a living wage and a union to workers. In the first part of this two-part chapter, Scott Nova of the U.S.-based Worker Rights Consortium makes the argument for initiatives such as the DSP and Alta Gracia, which are geared toward a reform of the industry-pricing and sourcing practices to make social compliance in apparel supply chains feasible. In the second part, John Kline, Professor at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, considers the social labeling challenges that the Alta Gracia case poses for NGOs, corporations, and consumers.
