The apparel industry is intentionally opaque; brands do everything they can to hide where they produce the products and conceal the work conditions. This makes it all the more crucial that we be vigilant and deliberate when signing multi-million dollar deals with companies like Under Armour. Instead, the decision about who would manufacture the new University of Wisconsin Athletics uniforms was made behind closed doors and announced after the fact.
The Adidas logo on the equipment of the Badger teams has been a hallmark of UW sports and bookstore gear for the last five years. But UW has now ended its contract with Adidas and begun a relationship with Under Armour.
The questions the Student Labor Action Coalition wishes to raise are not over which brand looks cooler or is more popular, but rather how we decide who we want to sponsor our university. The key question is who runs our community?
UW has had a proud tradition of shared governance, the idea that students, faculty, workers, administrators and the chancellor should collectively decide the fate of the university. This is because what happens here affects all of us, from the freshmen all the way up to the chancellor. Therefore, everyone should have a say in almost all of the decisions.
The students have an elected body, the Associated Students of Madison, whose duty it is to represent student interests, and students have fought side by side with other members of campus to establish policies to get our voices heard. For example, the Labor Codes Licensing Advisory Committee is a group of students, faculty, staff and administrators whose job it is to collectively decide on these matters.
But they heard nothing of this Under Armour deal until after it happened.
The question of where we get our clothes is not a trivial fashion choice. The global apparel trade is one of the most oppressive, exploitative and dangerous industries right now.
In 2013, more than 1100 factory workers in Bangladesh were killed in a single building collapse, even though employers knew the building was unsound. This happened at the same time that all the major apparel brands fired workers and moved factories from Indonesia to Honduras and the Dominican Republic, leaving behind unpaid wages, unemployment and more poverty in their pursuit of ever-increasing profits.
They abandon profitable factories simply to chase even greater profits and increase their own wealth. Nowhere in the Wisconsin Idea is there any support for the wage theft, exploitation or greed that occurs within the apparel industry.
If we hope to have everyone’s values represented in the decisions the university makes, then we need to have everyone’s voices represented in those decisions. When the chancellor and university administrators make decisions unilaterally, the principles of the university are compromised and we’re left wearing sweatshirts made in sweatshops.
The Student Labor Action Coalition is student organization dedicated to informing students of workers struggle for justice.
