By Tim Redmond
It’s gotten surprisingly little press (outside of the NY Times), but the decision by Russell Athletic to rehire 1,200 workers in Honduras who had been thrown out of work when the company closed a factory in the wake of a union-organizing effort is a very big deal.
It’s easy to criticize student activists; they’re too idealistic, they’re just kids who don’t understand the real world, nobody listens to them anyway, or maybe (as one of my professors at Wesleyan once said about anti-apartheid activists) they just don’t have enough homework.
But the folks at United Students Against Sweatshopsnot only took on a good cause — they developed a brilliant strategy that actually worked. Targeting Russell Athletic made perfect sense for college students: Russell makes millions of dollars off university licensing deals. So students at hundreds of college campuses could work locally, demanding that their school cut its ties with Russell until it settled with the union in Honduras.
The local pressure worked. More than 80 colleges and universities, including Harvard, NYU and Stanford, agreed to cut off the deals that allowed Russell to use their logos on sportswear — and that convinced Russell to turn 180 degrees around and accept the union in Honduras.
“This is the culmination of 12 years of student organizing around this issue,” Shaun Martinez, a 2008 graduate of USC and a national staff organizer for USAS, told me. “We have never before been able to reverse a decision when a company closed a factory to stop union organizing efforts.”
The student group was able to leverage its success with colleges and universities to put pressure on Russell’s other major partners — like the NBA — and when NBA officials started hearing the message, Russell had no choice but to settle.
So chalk one up to the students; they’ve won a major victory not just for organized labor and the anti-sweatshop movement but for campus organizing everywhere.