Sweatshops at San Francisco State

Sweatshops at San Francisco State?

Thursday, October 19, 2000

I am a graduate student at San Francisco State University. In March of this year, SFSU became one of the first California schools to sign onto the Worker Rights Consortium, a non-profit independent monitoring association for collegiate merchandise. United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), a group of college students nationwide who organized against international garment industry labor abuses that increased exponentially as a result of increased global ‘free’ trade, started the WRC. To guard against the sale of sweatshop goods on our campuses, the WRC requires that member schools like SFSU adhere to a code of conduct that insures, among other things, that the companies our bookstore buys from agree to independent monitoring of their production facilities, that those companies pay their workers a living wage, and that they do not interfere with the right of workers to organize. So imagine our dismay when we discovered that SFSU has not disclosed its vender information to the WRC, that Campus Support Services may have inhibited union organizing on our own campus while concurrently doubling the workload of our custodians without increasing their wages!

SFSU has not responded to requests for vender disclosure from the Worker Rights Consortium. USAS at SFSU believes that the university has violated its agreement with students to abide by the WRC rules regarding disclosure and the code of conduct. We want full disclosure now.

Campus Support Services fired (for the second year in a row) the student workers at SFSU’s Recycling Center who were organizing a union in June of this year under the guise of terminating temporary appointments and budgetary constraints. The Recycling Resource Center Report from fiscal year 97-98 shows the program is “cost-effective,” a savings to the university, a benefit to the environment, and details numerous educational programs. [SFSU Recycling/Resource Center Annual Report FY 1997-1998, page 8] Were students exercising their international and federal rights to organize a trade union in their workplace released from their jobs two years in a row? Join us in demanding that student recyclers be rehired.

But worst of all is the treatment of our custodians by Campus Support Services administration. CSS custodians inherited recycling duties without commensurate compensation under treat of termination! According to administration, there is no money to increase the wages of staff custodians, to make the ‘temporary’ workers permanent, or to rehire the student recyclers. Unfortunately, they refuse to release the Support Services budgets for 1999-2000 or 2000-2001 to support their argument. The grievances filed by the California State Employees Association (CSEA) on behalf of Unit 5 have yet to be resolved. Some custodians are still considered ‘temporary workers’ after working here for years and could be fired at anytime. SFSU custodians have also been forced to sign blank job descriptions and performance evaluations or fear retaliation. Monolingual custodians have been forced to interpret English-only directions, use vacation time for sick leave, and work understaffed without proper materials in a hostile environment. Requests for an investigation of the Campus Support Services managers by CSEA, the SFSU Director of Human Resources, and the staff custodians have also gone unheeded. We want the budgets made public and justice for the custodial staff!

For more information please contact United Students Against Sweatshops at San Francisco State University at usas [at] sfsu.edu or by phone at 415-841-0140.

Thank you,
Lilly Vallee on behalf of
United Students Against Sweatshops at SFSU