Even if the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the Student Labor Action Coalition must be very pleased with itself. How could it not be? After a concerted effort by the organization, the University of Wisconsin decided to sever its contract with Russell Athletics, an apparel company accused of having permitted unfair labor practices at an 1800-worker plant managed by one of its subsidiaries in Honduras.

Consider it a triumph of progressivism at the local level. The factory had purportedly been closed by Russell in retaliation for attempts by workers to unionize and demand higher wages. In response, UW cut its contract. And Tuesday night, SLAC had two of the union’s organizers, Norma Castellanos and Moises Alvarado, speak about their travails to a motley assortment of activists.

To be certain, the conduct of Russell’s affiliate company, Jerzees de Honduras, was vicious in some respects. The Fair Labor Association conducted three independent reports, and their conclusion indicated that union workers had, far from experiencing simple hostility, been threatened with death via decapitation. Castellanos and Alvarado confirmed the allegations in their speeches.

So given the facts, how could any person with a semblance of compassion argue that SLAC was wrong in pushing the UW to sever its contract with Russell?

The issue, sadly for the absolutists, is considerably more nuanced than SLAC is willing to admit.

Firstly, the FLA, in the same report, indicated the factory had closed primarily due to economic reasons, and cited a declining demand for Russell products as well as the closure of three other Russell factories in Honduras last year alone.

Then there’s the problem of SLAC’s presentation of the issue. Before Castellanos and Alvarado came onto the stage, a primitive flowchart was drawn on the chalkboard, inexplicably connecting Warren Buffet, whose conglomerate owns Fruit of the Loom and therefore Russell, to the abuse of workers themselves. What should have been a relatively straightforward critique of brutal management and indifferent government became an indictment of a single corporate figure who is, unfortunately for SLAC’s whimsically self-important activists, very marginally connected with the companies he owns, busy as he is with giving away the vast majority of his fortune to the same causes the campus left habitually agitates for.

SLAC astoundingly fails to understand that agitation in the form of a boycott of Russell products, a move intended to hurt the company, will in the end only boot thousands of workers out of jobs. This has already proven to be the case in Honduras.

Certainly, any benefits of cheap labor must be balanced by concerns about the safety of workers. But to make the logically ridiculous leap that wages must exceed the value the market sets for them is not only silly — it harms the very people it paternalistically claims to be helping. For every Honduran worker who cannot subsist on $60 a week, there are multitudes of Southeast Asian workers who can. Is the university therefore morally obligated to deny them employment?

Although SLAC is no doubt loath to admit it, efforts to restrict a company’s ability to set its own wages will either cause it to invest in mechanization processes that make workers from the Third World inessential, or those companies will simply go elsewhere.

So will the former workers get new jobs after contracts are cut? Or will they return to the same cycle of rural poverty that has dominated the lives of those living in the developing world for the past century? SLAC, despite its palpable smugness about its very ephemeral success, provided not a single answer.

As for Castellanos and Alvarado, they are painfully uncertain about their future. The factory they worked in is closed, permanently for now. Russell has the opportunity to reevaluate its contract with the university until March. In the meantime, 1800 workers are out of a job, potentially for much longer, all so SLAC can deem itself morally superior for having struck a blow against that omnipotent bogeyman of leftists everywhere — the American corporation. Then again, I didn’t see anyone from SLAC volunteer to employ the people whose jobs Russell had terminated. And if an illusory notion of moral vindication is all the SLAC has to offer in return for the lost work, then all they have accomplished is the placement of one more brick of good intentions on the long, long road to hell.

Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in economics and history.