I Went to Cornell and All I Got was This Sweatshop Made Cap

Thu07Aug2008

I Went to Cornell and All I Got was This Sweatshop Made Cap

15:34 H | Topics: Dominican Republic - Fashion - Labor

Wanna show off some alumni pride? Or how about that cap of your favorite baseball team? If you look at the label of your cap and see that it was made in the Dominican Republic, chances are it was made in a sweatshop.

Sweatshop workers stitch logos into caps for Major League Baseball, the NHL, the NBA and the NFL. Many college caps are made there, too. One company, BJ&B, for example, manufactures caps for the Universities of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Missouri, Connecticut, Arizona, Louisiana State, Cornell, Northwestern, Penn State, Tulane and Purdue...Here’s how it works: A university licenses its name and logo to American apparel distributors like Nike, Starter, Champion and Reebok, and earns about $1.50 per cap. BJ&B, for example, then pays the worker 8 cents per cap. At that pay rate, a worker takes home $40 for a typical 56-hour work week, as calculated by UNITE, an anti-sweatshop lobbying group. The total cost of making the cap comes out to about $6.08, but consumers pay about $19.95 for the cap.

The good news is that BJ&B workers, thanks in part to universities' pressuring, formed a union but they are only one sweatshop in a sea of free-trade areas that allow companies located there to be exempt from import fees and income taxes on the backs of workers.

Via / Republica Update