-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: Social Movements Working Group <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:53:29 -0400
Subject: [smwg01] anti-sweatshop sign-on statement
Bob Ross is doing some really good public sociology/activist
intellectual stuff.
STeve
Dear Colleagues,
Early this year I was privileged to witness an historic decision:
United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), the premier national social
justice advocate on American college campuses, began the construction
of a campaign to combat sweatshops by strengthening unions around the
world.
Faculty members from many campuses are joining with USAS to support
this campaign.
Below is a statement that we are asking faculty members across the
country to sign, indicating their support for this important effort.
(The statement and the list of faculty signatories will be published
later this year in the Chronicle of Higher Education).
USAS has available material, including Frequently Asked Questions,
that they or I will be pleased to send you upon request. Briefly, the
students will ask that university licensees reserve an escalating
portion of their production for union factories that pay a living wage
- unions from anywhere as long as they are truly workers' democratic
choices.
I am asking you to join us in signing this statement. To do so, simply
email USAS campaign organizer Zack Knorr at [EMAIL PROTECTED] (and
please copy me) with your name, school, department, and a line saying
that you are in support. Also, please feel free to forward this email,
with your own personal comments, to other colleagues you think will be
sympathetic and lend their support to this important effort.
At the end of my work on sweatshops in the apparel industry I argued
that there were three pillars of decency for workers by the middle of
the 290th century: their own associations and self -defense, usually in
the form of unions; successful alliance with reformers and consumers
(usually from the middle classes); and together, sympathetic public
policy. This campaign can help erect once again the first pillar
decency
In Solidarity,
Robert J.S. "Bob" Ross
Statement in Support of United Students Against Sweatshops' Sweat-Free
Campus Campaign
It is now more than five years since colleges and universities began
adopting anti-sweatshop codes of conduct. Not enough has changed in
factories producing collegiate apparel. Apparel workers around the
world too often face abusive treatment, excessive working hours, wages
that are woefully inadequate to meet basic needs, and the denial of
universally acknowledged associational rights when they organize for
improvements. Apparel brands put tremendous pressure on their supplier
factories to cut costs and these pressures make broad, deep and
sustainable improvements in wages and working conditions effectively
impossible. The gains we have seen at individual factories have been
too limited and too fragile.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned, strongly support
United Students Against Sweatshops' (USAS) new sweat-free campus
proposal. Under this proposal, campus logo apparel would be produced in
designated supplier factories where workers are able to enforce their
rights through union representation and are paid a living wage. The
goal of this proposal is to supply these factories with steady orders
from university licensees at prices adequate to allow full respect for
workers' rights.
We realize this proposal challenges current practices, but we believe
it is fully achievable. The new sweat-free campus proposal strengthens
existing initiatives in order to bring us closer to the day when
university apparel is truly made under dignified working conditions.
Robert J.S. Ross, PhD
Chair, 2005-6, Section on Political Economy of the World-System,
American Sociological Association
Professor of Sociology
Director, International Studies Stream
Clark University
950 Main Street
Worcester, MA 01610
508 793 7376
fax: 508 793 8816
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Boyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Social Movements Working Group <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:17:51 -0400
Subject: Re: [smwg01] Peak Oil and Energy talks
Hi Dana!
Go for it..I know that Mathew Simmons is coming to speak down
there..we have
quite a peak oil group up here too. One friend set up the
www.peakoil.org a few months ago and very quickly was getting up to
4000 hits a
day. The Colin Campbell, the British predictor of global production
peaking at about 2010 (and in End of Suburbia and a more recent dvd),
called my
friend and asked to buy the legal rights to his website. Jim turned
him down so we're still cranking.
So what comes first..peak oil or the "peaking" of the dollar? Please
tell
everyone that Robert Williams , the Guilford economist, will speak up
here Friday, Oct 21 at 7:30pm on his new book on global finance "The
Moneychangers", Zed Press, forthcoming). His talk "Will the Dollar
Crash?"
goes after the Bush policies of maintaining a weak dollar and heavy
deficit
spending. Robert says it's really not if but when the dollar will
spiral downward in global currency markets.. and now that we just
borrow for for
Katrina and ,of course, the war etc..it's really scary.
If people can't make it for the evening event, I'll also have him in a
classroom
at 2pm.
Take care!
Jeff
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Following up on Gerald Cecil's talk last Wednesday on peak oil, I
wanted to
> forward the schedule of upcoming talks at Duke this semester on oil
and
> energy issues. For the full listing, go to:
> <http://www.physics.unc.edu/about/robertsonseminars
>
> I also highly recommend the documentary "The End of Suburbia" for
those who
> haven't yet seen it!
>
> --- You are currently subscribed to smwg01 as: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To
unsubscribe send a blank email to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--- You are currently subscribed to smwg01 as: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To
unsubscribe send a blank email to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--- You are currently subscribed to smwg01 as: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To unsubscribe send a blank email to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
