By the end of this month, Chancellor David Ward might be lucky enough to receive a freshly-baked cake from his friends at the Student Labor Action Coalition.

It’s all part of the cyclical relationship between SLAC and the University of Wisconsin: Licensed company does something bad, SLAC raises a fuss, licensed company doesn’t do anything, UW stays quiet, UW eventually cuts or threatens to cut contract with licensed company, chancellor receives a cake and sometimes, the licensed company does the right thing and reevaluates its labor practices.

Right now, we’re in the “UW stays quiet” phase of this cycle. SLAC will hold a rally outside of Ward’s office today to encourage him to cut the university’s contract with Adidas because of an accusation that employees at an Indonesian factory manufacturing Adidas products did not receive severance packages after being laid-off. Biddy Martin’s administration cut UW’s contract with Nike in 2010.

SLAC, despite frequently being assailed as a “protest club,” is on the right track. In the likely decision that Ward does not cut UW’s contract with Adidas – the contract is significantly more financially substantial than Nike’s – the athletic wear giant should at least be endlessly ridiculed for a jejune strategy in handling an important controversy.

“The central fact remains that the PT Kizone factory was illegally closed and abandoned by its owner, not by the Adidas Group, and this occurred more than six months after we placed our last order with them,” Adidas said in a statement yesterday. “We honored all terms of our contract, paying the factory owners every penny owed.”

That’s corporate PR speak for “we’re a good company and didn’t do anything wrong because it was the other guy who screwed up, not us.” Adidas’ strategy appears to be passing blame for the incident to a little-known international contractor that should be held accountable for unfair labor practices.

Adidas is a mammoth-sized corporation with extensive financial resources. PT Kizone is a tiny regional supplier known mostly in the United States for its unfair labor practices. It doesn’t have an official website, likely for its own protection.

Adidas, like most large apparel conglomerates, exerts a significant financial influence over contractors like PT Kizone. Michael Reich, a professor of labor economics at the University of California-Berkeley, told me contractors like PT Kizone often devote 100 percent of their resources to one company.

Reich said he served on UC’s committee to oversee licensee fair labor practices of licensees and found that companies often decide to quickly clean up practices overseas.

“What I saw was that the actual labor cost in these plants is very small compared to the final product price,” Reich said. “Really, it wasn’t that expensive to clean up the conditions.”

That statement easily could have come from a SLAC member in Madison. Instead, it came from the director of one of the leading labor economics institutes in the nation. Jon Perkins, SLAC’s spokesperson, also said Adidas has a significant amount of resources at its disposal to reprimand PT Kizone.

This is why I’m puzzled at Adidas’ response to its most recent controversy at UW. Instead of publicly chastising or reprimanding PT Kizone for the unfair practices, it simply said the blame does not lie with Adidas. It has worsened its own reputation among UW students and only done more to anger SLAC and anti-sweatshop activists.

Of course, it wouldn’t be fair for me to say these things without acknowledging that I typed this column on a MacBook Pro, a product from another company that has passed blame for disturbing labor practices to a weaker contractor in Asia.

But both the cases of Apple and Adidas have begun important conversations about corporate responsibility versus cheap labor. Adidas had an easy way out of this most recent campus controversy but for some absurd reason decided to make things more difficult and subject themselves to an even longer PR crisis on a large university campus.

Ryan Rainey ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in journalism and Latin American studies.