Asian Sourcing, the third Shanghai factory The Crimson attempted to visit, is a factory for The Game LLC of Phoenix City, AL. According to the FLA database, the factory is located at 1188 Li An Road.
But local city officials have never heard of the company. And according to local police, cab drivers and a city map, there is no Li An Road in the postal code area that the FLA website lists as the site of Asia Sourcing.
Keeping Tabs?
The difficulty of non-FLA observers in locating—never mind receiving permission to visit—factories that produce Harvard products underlines the challenge facing United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), whose members are gathering at a national anti-sweatshop conference for students at Tufts University this weekend.
“That only confirmed what the entire activist world has already decried, which is that the FLA is a sham organization,” says Madeleine S. Elfenbein ’04, a USAS conference organizer.
“They are an elaborate, corporate cover-up,” she says, noting that Nike—a corporation that has been a major target of anti-sweatshop activism—was a founding member of the FLA.
“The only investigations in which the FLA has made any improvements are those done on the coattails of the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC)—initiated by the WRC and first publicized by the WRC,” says Matthew L. Teaman, a USAS representative and Ohio State University student who serves on the WRC governing board.
Members of Harvard Students Against Sweatshops met with University officials last fall to press them to join the WRC, a non-profit monitoring agency founded by unions, non-governmental organizations and universities to prevent overseas sweatshop labor.
But despite the apparent inaccuracies in FLA records, Harvard officials remain confident in the FLA, which Harvard continues to use, instead of the WRC, to monitor factories that produce its merchandise.
“At this point in time, I’d have to say I’m not concerned because the process is so new,” says Kevin P. Scully, a Harvard trademark licensing and operations administrator. “I have every confidence in the people involved with these issues at the FLA.”
Although independent observers have yet to visit a factory that produces Harvard apparel, Wu Hongjun, a manager at Shanghai Goldluck Necktie, was willing to describe general conditions in factories.
Production of the ties begins at a factory in Zhejiang, according to Wu, and is completed in Jiangsu Province. The workers are mostly women between the ages of 20 and 50 who work from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., though sometimes they are asked to stay until 8 p.m. There are about 120 workers at each factory, he says, who make “about several hundred Harvard ties every year.”
The workers earn about 1,000 RMB, or $122, a month, according to Wu. He says there are no children working in the factory but is not sure if there is a union.
When asked why the Shanghai Goldluck Necktie Company does not manufacture any ties in Shanghai, Wu, sitting in a conference room next to a faux Greek bust wearing a novelty necktie in the shape of corn cob, says the answer is simple.
“It’s would cost too much money,” he says.
—Stephanie M. Skier contributed to the reporting of this article.
—Staff writer Amit R. Paley can be reached at paley@fas.harvard.edu.