Students at the University of Colorado are advocating for the school to cut ties with apparel companies that won’t sign an agreement to make working conditions safer in Bangladesh.
A local chapter of the United Students Against Sweatshops is calling on CU to terminate its contracts with VF Corp., the parent company for JanSport and VF Imagewear, which produce items adorned with the university logo.
Parker Haile, a CU sophomore studying chemical engineering, said he wants the university to put pressure on the company to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, an agreement meant to prevent fires, building collapses and other workplace accidents for garment workers.
The accord came about after the 2013 collapse of an eight-story building known as Rana Plaza that killed more than 1,100 people and injured more than 2,000. Nearly 200 brands worldwide have signed the agreement, including Adidas and H&M.
Some companies, including Walmart, Gap and VF Corp., instead created the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a campaign led by 26 North American companies to improve safety for workers.
In the alliance’s first year, it inspected all 587 member factories, trained 1.1 million workers in basic fire safety and compensated 1,000 displaced workers, according to a 2014 annual report.
Haile said the alliance doesn’t have enough independent oversight and is less stringent than the accord.
“We feel like any day that goes by, it’s just more uncertainty to those workers that they could go into work one day and their building will collapse or there could be a fire that they have to continue working through,” Haile said.
VF Corp. has some 90 factories that employ 190,000 workers in Bangladesh, according to the company’s website. JanSport does not manufacture items in Bangladesh, according to the company.
So far, 16 universities have cut ties with JanSport or VF Imagewear, including Cornell University, Arizona State University, Penn State University and the University of Florida, according to United Students Against Sweatshops.
The CU student group hopes to raise awareness about the issue by bringing former Bangladesh apparel workers to campus. Mahinoor Begum, who survived the Rana Plaza factory collapse, and Kalpona Akter, who heads a labor rights organization in Bangladesh, will speak at CU on Thursday.
“A lot of people don’t really think about where their clothes come from,” said Cameron Seamans, a sophomore studying electrical and computer engineering.
CU spokesman Bronson Hilliard confirmed that the university received a letter from the student group Feb. 3. He said the university’s athletic department reviewed its relationship with VF Corp. in July.
“We confirmed at that time that JanSport has never produced collegiate apparel in Bangladesh, and VF has not produced any collegiate apparel for any university in Bangladesh since fall of 2013,” Hilliard said.
He added that CU supports “humane and safe working conditions” for people who produce the university’s apparel.
CU has licensing agreements with hundreds of companies that have factories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Canada, China and other countries, according to the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor rights monitoring organization.
“Our approach is to work with our vendors and their professional associations and consortia to make positive safety and workplace improvements,” he said.
