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RESPONDING TO “WE NEED MORE SWEATSHOPS” IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN COLLEGIAN (COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY)

Team Sweat:

Below is my response to “We Need More Sweatshops,” an editorial written about my April 12th talk at Colorado State University. If you would like to read the original editorial, you can find it at: http://www.collegian.com/index.php/article/2011/04/we_need_more_sweatshops.

Peace, Jim Keady

To the Editor:

When I read the first two paragraphs of “We Need More Sweatshops,” in the April 13th edition of the Rocky Mountain Collegian, my gut told me that there was no way that the writer(s) was in attendance at my April 12th talk, “Behind the Swoosh: Sweatshops and Social Justice.” To be sure though, I placed a call to the newsroom and spoke with Jim Sojourner, the Managing Editor of the paper. In our conversation, Mr. Sojourner confirmed that no one from the editorial board had come to my talk.

By writing the piece that they did, without attending my talk or even placing a phone call to ask questions from the primary source, Mr. Sojourner and his colleagues did a disservice to the CSU community by completely misinforming readers with regard to my analysis and suggested actions for dealing with the Nike sweatshop issue.

For example, they wrote, “…abolishing sweatshop jobs will eliminate one way out of these (poverty) conditions and would force the back-broken poor to languish in otherwise inescapable misery.”

I never, not once in my talk at CSU, nor in my decade and half of activism on this issue, have called for abolishing jobs. What I have called for is the transformation of these jobs from “sweatshop jobs” to jobs where workers are paid a living wage and are bargained with in good faith. That is how you move people from poverty to prosperity. You do not do it by moving people from subsistence farming to wage slavery in sweatshops, as the RMC Editorial Board suggests.

How could real prosperity happen for Nike’s workers? Nike needs to pay them a living wage. The wages of Nike’s workers in the developing world could be tripled and it would only add a few dollars on to the cost of a pair of Nike sneakers. The multiplier effect of this increase in wages at the grassroots level would be monumental and would radically transform millions of lives in the developing world.

If the CSU Community would like to better understand what we are actually trying to do, I encourage you to visit www.teamsweat.org or www.facebook.com/teamsweat. I also would encourage you to check out the following books to get a sense of how the global economy currently works and more importantly, how we can transform it to be more fair and just for all: When Corporations Rule the World, by David Korten; Fair Trade for All, by Joseph Stiglitz; and Confessions of an Economic Hitman, by John Perkins.

I hope you will take the time to visit our campaign websites and to read the suggested books. I also hope that in the future, the RMC Editorial Board will take their responsibility as members of the fourth estate more seriously and will do some actual research on an issue before publishing half-baked missives that are high on ideological rhetoric, but low on facts and reasoned argument.

Peace,

Jim Keady, Director

Educating for Justice, Inc.