Worker Rights Consortium (WRC)

The Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) is a nonprofit watchdog organization that helps affiliated colleges and universities enforce manufacturing codes of conduct in factories that produce clothing and other goods bearing their names and logos. The WRC has authored its own model code of conduct that includes, for example, provisions requiring payment of a living wage and compliance with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) health and safety standards. However, while the WRC encourages affiliated schools to adopt a code as strong as the WRC code, it does not require that they do so. The WRC conducts investigations of working conditions at factories where university goods are produced. When problems are identified, the WRC works with licensees, factory managers, workers, and worker advocates to correct the problems. According to WRC's Web site, the investigations are carried out by teams comprising “knowledgeable representatives of the local community, including officials of local labor rights NGOs and/or local academic experts, and at least one member of the WRC staff or Governing Board.” The WRC launches factory investigations in response to worker complaints or on a proactive basis—for example, where local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) suspect there are problems or where there is little information about a major source of university goods. The WRC's Web site says that it is committed to “meticulous objectivity and methodological rigor.” The results of these investigations are published on the group's Web site.

The WRC says that the collegiate licensing is now a $3-billion-a-year business. Schools earn 8% on the wholesale value of the apparel they sell. In 2005, the University of Texas earned $5 million in licensing revenue. The companies that pay schools these royalties in exchange for the right to use their logos on caps, sweatshirts, jackets, and other items range from Ben Silver Blazer Buttons of Charleston, SC, to Nike.

There are more than 150 colleges and universities affiliated with the WRC. Affiliates agree to adopt a manufacturing code, advise the WRC of the names and locations of factories that produce their logo goods, and pay the WRC fees that are $1,000 or 1% of gross licensing revenues (but no more than $50,000), whichever is greater. Roughly 40% of the WRC's funds come from affiliation fees. The remaining 60% is raised through grants from philanthropic foundations and the federal government. Past grantors have included the Rockefeller Foundation and the New World Foundation.

The WRC held its founding conference on April 7, 2000. The organization's Web site claims that it was created by college and university administrations, students, and labor rights experts. That may or may not be technically accurate, but the reality is that the impetus behind the WRC was student antisweatshop activists in United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) together with UNITE (the apparel and textile workers union) and labor rights activists. USAS itself had been suckled by the AFL-CIO. USAS disrupted campuses by means of tactics such as occupying the offices of college presidents and hunger strikes to coerce their colleges into affiliating with the WRC. Few, if any, college administrations have been able to resist these tactics.

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