‘No-Sweat’ Merchandise now UMSU policy

With files from Fair Trade Manitoba

GARRY SRAN

Many of you have all heard the awful stories of men, women, and children working all hours of the day in sweatshops for low wages, all to produce low-price apparel, food, and other products for North American and European consumption. For those of us who don’t want to support these sweatshops, the difficulty is how to truly determine if a T-shirt or water bottle has been made under fair conditions.

In recent years, the movement to ensure fair trade has grown substantially. Last fall, Manitoba became the first province in Canada to announce a “no sweat” policy for all its purchasing. Although the fair trade philosophy has been debated and promoted for decades, major organizations and governments are taking notice, thanks in large part to the persistence of international development movements and producers themselves.

Fair trade is an alternative approach to conventional international trade. The five basic criteria to ensure Fair Trade products are that the workers who produce the goods are paid decent wages; have the right to unionize, that small landholder businesses have a democratic structure, that there are health and safety standards in the workplace, and that no child labour or forced labour produced the product.

Typically, buyers (including individuals and companies) look for quality products at the lowest possible price. Unfortunately, for producers in developing countries, the lowest price usually means exploitation and awful working conditions. Fair trade offers an alternative that ensures prices reflect the true cost of labour and production. This philosophy covers the cost of environmentally sustainable production practices, and workers make a sufficient income to cover housing, food, and education for their families.

In October 2006, students’ associations that are part of the Canadian Federation of Students in Manitoba organized a one-day conference on fair trade. The U of M students that attended this meeting felt it was important to bring the values of fair trade into the students’ union, and forwarded the suggestion to the UMSU policy and bylaws committee. After a few months of wordsmithing to ensure the policy was enforceable, the council of the University of Manitoba Students’ Union passed a “Code of Conduct for Suppliers” policy that outlines the employment standards that UMSU requires of all our apparel suppliers, as well as the contractors of our suppliers.

UMSU is only one of the many organizations on campus that purchase apparel, but hopefully, awareness of fair-trade merchandise will continue to spread. Fair-trade coffee has been available at Degrees and IQ’s for about three years now, and is becoming more and more popular as people learn more about the importance of fair trade.

On average, fair-trade products cost 10 per cent more than conventional products, but this small cost for us as consumers results in producers’ income doubling or tripling. For example, in 2005 there were more than a million farmers and workers at 548 fair-trade certified organizations in over 50 countries in the world. These workers received 25 per cent to 33 per cent of the total revenue of purchases of their products, while under conventional trade practices workers received seven to 15 per cent.

Although UMSU apparel will not be made in sweatshops or by child labour, how will you know who made your new pair of jeans or shoes? Or the conditions under which the food you eat was produced? There is a useful listing of stores that sell fair trade products on the website www.fairtrademanitoba.ca, and hopefully this list will continue to grow. If your favourite store isn’t listed, make an effort next time you’re there to ask the manager if they know under what kind of working conditions their products were manufactured. And, of course, if you have ideas for how UMSU could improve the products and purchasing practices on campus, please feel free to contact your students’ union.

Garry Sran is president of UMSU and has an honours degree in economics.