By: Jacob Kushner
University of Wisconsin-Madison

 

"Passing through the black iron gate into the industrial zone of Villa Alta Gracia in the Dominican Republic, you might expect to hear the clank of tools and the noise of diesel-powered generators that make its factories run.

Instead, the blaring horns of merengue music drift from the door of a small warehouse, where one hundred and thirty workers talk and joke as they stitch together thousands of colorful T-shirts.

During an age in which nearly all clothing sold in the United States is made in developing countries by workers who are paid just pennies an hour, Alta Gracia Apparel is not your typical textile factory: its employees earn three times the nation’s minimum wage of $150 per month. They get health insurance, a pension, vacation days, and maternity leave. They sit in ergonomic chairs and drink water that they themselves have quality-tested for pathogens.

With the busy factory floor behind her, Maritza Vargas gives visitors a tour of Alta Gracia Apparel. Describing how conditions and wages have changed for the better, Vargas, a worker and a union leader, says of the previous factory owners, “They didn’t value us.”

It’s hard to fathom that a decade ago, many of these same people produced hats for a company that paid them just eighty-four cents an hour, forced them to work overtime without extra pay, and sometimes verbally and physically abused them."

To continue reading Kushner's story clikc here: http://onwisconsin.uwalumni.com/features/a-thread-of-hope/

Fordham Expands Its Alta Gracia Clothing Line

Students Team with Barnes & Noble to Support the Living Wage Manufacturer, Alta Gracia.

By KELLY KULTYS
ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR
http://www.theramonline.com/news/fordham-expands-its-alta-gracia-clothing-line-1.2769475#.UHWfry7A_QM

Published: Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Updated: Wednesday, September 26, 2012 11:09

The Fordham University Bookstore has recently strengthened its relationship with the college apparel manufacturer, Alta Gracia, through its purchase of over 1,500 units of clothing from the vendor, Alta Gracia is not just a typical collegiate clothing manufacturer, as it is considered “a pioneer in ending the use of poverty-wage sweatshops,” according to  BNC News. 
Alta Gracia, located in the Dominican Republic, is a branch of Knights’ Apparel Inc., which designs clothing for college students. What makes Alta Gracia different from a traditional factory is that it pays its workers a living wage. According to bncnews.com, a living wage “enables an employee to afford adequate food, clean water, clothing, shelter, health care, child care and education for themselves and their families.”

“We are trying to get more people to know that this company exists, and they are actually doing something positive,” Jason Figueroa, general manager of the Fordham University Bookstore, said. “[Barnes & Noble] is now conscientious of who we are doing business with. I’m glad to work for a company that at least cares about these things.”
Bncnews.com also reported that this living wage is more than three times the average salary of other clothing-factory workers in the Dominican Republic. Many employees praise Alta Gracia for its ground-breaking measures, as its workers can now live a more complete life. With their wages, many of the workers have been able to purchase food to feed their families, install running water and upgrade their living quarters.
Here at Fordham, it is easy to see the affects of the growing relationship. The Alta Gracia rolled T-shirts are one of the prominent displays in the bookstore, and they have been one of the most popular items sold.
“[The rolled T-shirts] are one of the bread-and-butter products for all of our stores,” Figueroa said. “They sold extremely well, especially for dads who came in for homecoming who didn’t want to try on a whole bunch of shirts. They were perfectly packaged for them to just say ‘I’ll have one of those and one of those, OK, we’re done. Let’s go to the game’.”
The push for an extended Alta Gracia clothing line in the bookstore began last year with Tim Casey, FCRH ’12, and Brendan Francolini, GSB ’14 and USG vice president of operations. The two brought a proposal to the Fordham Bookstore. Before their proposal, the bookstore offered a small selection of Alta Gracia apparel. The clothing, was hidden in the back and made up less than 10 percent of the bookstore’s apparel.

“What we ended up saying was this is a great cause, and it’s in line with the University’s mission of trying to alleviate poverty,” Francolini said. “So how can we support that? We want to show that students are interested in and support this.”

Casey and Francolini suggested that the bookstore purchase a greater percentage of its clothing from Alta Gracia and increase its prominence in the bookstore. The Barnes & Noble College Division, the company that owns the bookstore, was already involved with Alta Gracia. It had ordered more than half of the products offered by Alta Gracia. It recently expanded its involvement, purchasing 116,000 units of clothing for a total of over 1.1 million dollars.

“All 700 plus stores took Alta Gracia as the vendor,” Figueroa said. “We’ve replaced an older vendor and went exclusively with Alta Gracia. They actually weren’t sure if they could handle the weight of 700 stores ordering from them, but they did a great job.”

Up until this year, Fordham was not as heavily involved with the Alta Gracia line as other Barnes & Noble sponsored bookstores, such as those located at Duke University and New York University, which each sold over $300,000 worth of Alta Gracia products. Casey and Francolini suggested that Fordham get more involved as they argued that Alta Gracia embodied Fordham’s mission: “Fordham is committed to research and education that assist in the alleviation of poverty, the promotion of justice, the protection of human rights and respect for the environment.”
They were very successful. The line is in the process of expanding even more. Figueroa hopes to continue diversifying the bookstore’s Alta Gracia products this spring.
“We’re actually expanding, with more shirts coming in the spring,” Figueroa said. “Hopefully some more fashion styles, but we’ll see. The important thing is we’re expanding, because they did a great job, and [Barnes & Noble] is happy with the products, the styles, the timeliness.”

Other offices are becoming more involved with the campaign as well. The Office of Residential Life has been one of the main supporters on campus. All T-shirts ordered through the department must be purchased from Alta Gracia, so those placed by residential assistants and the Residence Hall Association will support this cause.

“That’s been implemented slowly throughout the summer, but now it is in full force,” Francolini said. “Dean Kim Russell was responsible for providing that support.”

One of Francolini’s main goals is to continue this campus-wide integration. Students for Fair Trade and United Student Government are two organizations already involved, but Francolini hopes more groups will get on board, especially in raising awareness about Alta Gracia.

“There’s a documentary [about Alta Gracia] that we’d like to show again to students because it highlighted the stories of workers and how the company transformed their lives,” Francolini said. 
Francolini and Figueroa believe that the continued growth of Alta Gracia on campus will help students learn more about their social responsibility to others, in addition to supporting “pioneer” in the fight against sweatshop clothing factories.

“It’s going to continue to grow and add more and more living wage jobs to the people in the Dominican Republic,” Figueroa said.

Raising Voices
By Jacob Palcic

Published: Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Updated: Monday, September 24, 2012 21:09

In addition to being the first time Notre Dame’s team has beaten Michigan since I started as an undergrad three years ago, Saturday’s football game marked two other important “firsts” for our University. Amidst the excitement of the evening home game, I looked around me and two things caught my attention: People were wearing union-made, living wage produced t-shirts and Hawaiian leis. I think there is an important connection behind these two apparently distinct adornments. As I looked around me, I saw two visual signs of solidarity that, led by Notre Dame students, were proudly donned throughout the stadium. And I was filled with hope!

Both the leis and the living-wage made t-shirts reflect two time-appropriate, incredibly needed aspects of solidarity on our campus and in our world. Students wore leis to show love and support for our fellow brother, Manti Te’o. This gesture symbolized genuine concern for one of the members of our community; it showed that students were mindful of his sorrow and accompanying him in it. In the case of the shirts, students collaborated with Notre Dame’s faculty to order our student shirts from Alta Gracia, the only college apparel factory that pays its workers a living wage, allows them to unionize and thus maintain a dignified quality of life. This intentional decision shows how students can choose to be in solidarity with people far beyond our campus community by recognizing our common humanity and caring for them as we need them to care for us. Having recently visited the factory and spoken with workers, I can attest that student solidarity through buying Alta Gracia apparel is having an incredible impact on the community where Alta Gracia’s factory is located in the Dominican Republic.

Solidarity can embody many forms. However, its spirit is always the same. Characterized by accompaniment, it fosters resilience which transforms and unites the community. At the heart is a genuine concern for human well-being that seeks to cultivate not only sympathy, but also empathy toward one another. Sometimes this takes on the form of mobile action such as students pooling resources to send clothes and food to victims of a recent natural disaster or refusing to buy clothing made in sweatshops until workers’ rights are respected. In such cases, this can contribute to economic and social resilience. Yet other times, the action is something quieter, but just as strong, like students supporting a classmate who just lost a loved one. I believe that the psychosocial resilience such a response can contribute can be just as powerful as the former example. In light of this, it seems that the challenge to live in solidarity as a campus-wide community is not separate from living in solidarity with the rest of our world. The more we are unified as a campus, the more we can understand the idea of a universal community.

In a world wide climate of discord and cut-throat competition that instills fear into individuals to survive by “looking out for number one,” our solidarity as students and as global citizens is needed here at Notre Dame more than ever. As incredibly privileged young people, this is what we need to intentionally focus the purpose of education on. Solidarity need not remain an abstract theological idea. As a community, we can and must channel all aspects of our education toward making it as tangible as the words of the hymn we sang in the Basilica on Sunday after the game: “Let us build a house where hands will reach beyond the wood and stone, to heal and strengthen, serve and teach and live the word they’ve known.” There is much that we can do as Notre Dame students; the social concerns of our time are many. With the Holy Cross of Notre Dame as our witness, let us focus our education toward development by living in solidarity. Events like that football game give me hope that together we can raise our voices much louder to sing “All are truly welcome in this place!” After all, solidarity at its core is about understanding the relationship of our human family.

Jacob Palcic is a junior. He can be reached at jpalcic@nd.edu

The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

The New York Times - By Steven Greenhouse - July 17, 2010
The new home will be four times bigger, with two bedrooms and an indoor bathroom; the couple and their three children now share a windowless bedroom and rely on an outhouse two doors away.

Ms. Castillo had long dreamed of a bigger, sturdier house, but three months ago something happened that finally made it possible: she landed a job at one of the world’s most unusual garment factories. Industry experts say it is a pioneer in the developing world because it pays a “living wage” — in this case, three times the average pay of the country’s apparel workers — and allows workers to join a union without a fight.

“We never had the opportunity to make wages like this before,” says Ms. Castillo, a soft-spoken woman who earns $500 a month. “I feel blessed.”

The factory is a high-minded experiment, a response to appeals from myriad university officials and student activists that the garment industry stop using poverty-wage sweatshops. It has 120 employees and is owned by Knights Apparel, a privately held company based in Spartanburg, S.C., that is the leading supplier of college-logo apparel to American universities, according to the Collegiate Licensing Company.

Read the full New York Times article

photo credit: Michael Kamber/New York Times

Channel One News ran a segment last week all about Alta Gracia, reaching 6 million high school students. The feature interviewed workers from the factory talking about how a living wage is changing their lives, explains living wage, and most importantly shows first hand the difference that it makes by showing an Alta Gracia employee’s current house and the new larger home she’s moving into.

It’s worth the watch . . . 

Spread the word!

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TOWN - by Heidi Coryell Williams - February 27, 2012 - Have you ever lost something so important that you felt like a piece of yourself was gone, too? A job opportunity. A chance at a better life. A child.

Now multiply that hopelessness by 100,000 people, put all of them in the same, desolate little town. Then leave them there for years, struggling for survival with no end in sight.

The bleakness is almost unimaginable, and yet it has addresses all over the world: Sri Lanka, Haiti, Honduras.

Chances are, your closet is full of clothes that came from one of these desperate places—factories where people toil for ten hours at a stretch without eating, drinking, or using a bathroom. Where they are paid so little, they can feed only themselves or their families, but rarely both. They go without healthcare, running water, and without seeing their children for weeks on end.

Chances are, the hands that stitched the shirt on your back have suffered more in a day than most of us will in a lifetime. Unless the tag inside reads, “Alta Gracia.”

Because in that case, it came from a small town in the Dominican Republic, owned by Spartanburg-based Knights Apparel. The licensed sports-apparel company is the largest distributor of collegiate apparel in the United States (surpassing Nike in 2005), but it has spent the past two years quietly building perhaps its most notable brand: Alta Gracia.

The shirt label shares its name with a village in the Dominican Republic and with the Knights Apparel factory there that employs 150 men and women. The factory pays these workers a living wage, or in Spanish “a wage with dignity,” and Knights Apparel remains the only company in the developing world to adopt a living-wage model like this.

Alta Gracia is a lone crusader in a cutthroat industry, but it is succeeding. That success brings hope that others will join their fight against poverty. And hope is what keeps the executives of Knights Apparel, the workers of Alta Gracia, and the families of disenfranchised sweatshops everywhere hanging on . . .

Stateside for more than 48 hours, and the thrill had yet to wear off for Donnie Hodge. The memory of it clung to him—standing in the center of his factory floor, a hundred men and women gathered before and around him, shouting, clapping, beaming.

Seamstresses and managers alike were cheering—for themselves, as much as for Hodge. They were applauding his February announcement of a new, big client: Notre Dame’s “The Shirt.” The order, which will net thousands of garments coming out of the Alta Gracia plant in coming months, brings the factory running as close to capacity as it ever has in its brief, two-year history. The plant has doubled the demand for its product in just over a year. And the Shirt, along with thousands of other orders from bookstores in the Palmetto State and across the nation, brought about this victory—one that everyone hoped for, but that few could guarantee in the highly competitive apparel marketplace.

Alta Gracia was officially running full tilt. No subsidies. No handouts. Just hard work and, in return for that work, a safe place to labor and a decent wage in return.

The factory cheered. Hodge concluded his address. And just as quickly as they had celebrated, the workers turned back to the job at hand: creating thousands of collegiate t-shirts and hoodies. Because the employees of Alta Gracia may be making garments to fill the clothing racks in campus bookstores across the United States, but what they are really creating is a life for themselves and their families.

In a town of 100,000, the employment rolls at Alta Gracia make up only a fraction of Villa Altagracia’s population, which on its face would seem a tragedy given that the community has an unemployment rate of 95 percent. But against the odds, their small share of work is already making waves down the street and across the globe.

there’s a lot of things that need to be done,” says Hodge, an Upstate native and Knights Apparel’s president and chief operating officer. “You can’t let the fact that what you are doing may make only a small footprint overall affect you.”

Truth is, small steps are what have made Knights Apparel’s Alta Gracia factory such a Cinderella story. Flash back to 2007, when Knights Apparel consolidated its multinational operations to a single facility in the Upstate. Just two years earlier, the company had surpassed Nike as the No. 1 provider of collegiate apparel, in addition to distributing some of the world’s most exclusive sports brands: Nascar, NFL, NHL, Major League Baseball, and college sports teams across the nation, to name a few. And yet, the company moved into its local offices quietly, without fanfare.

That’s because despite its size and reach, Knights Apparel will probably never be a household name. It’s a predictable outcome of selling products with someone else’s name on them—whether it’s Duke University or the Atlanta Braves. And, like most brand apparel companies, Knights Apparel doesn’t actually make most of the garments it distributes and sells. Instead, the model is to sub out the work to factories owned by third parties—usually in international locations.

The exception is Alta Gracia.

Two Georgetown University professors, John M. Kline and Edward Soule, who have an ongoing study of humane employment practices in the global apparel industry, describe the business model like this: “Most brand apparel companies do not produce anything. Rather they subcontract with literally thousands of ‘contract manufacturers’ around the world, using their purchasing power and ability to pit producer against producer to achieve the lowest possible costs.”

But with low costs come poor working conditions—where training is almost obsolete, workers are subject to harsh abuses, and wages barely cover the cost of getting to and from the factory. In the 1990s, an organization called United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) began to push back against this model, eventually eliciting an agreement from apparel companies to at least disclose the locations of the factories that produced their collegiate apparel. What they found was, not surprisingly, poor treatment of employees and even poorer wages.

Students demanded something better. Apparel manufacturers were under the gun. Enter Knights Apparel.

“We have a great partnership with all the universities,” Hodge recalls, and as he and company chief executive officer Joseph Bozich discussed what to do, they increasingly felt it needed to be something significant. Bozich, who is based in Chicago, asked Hodge to oversee the effort: creation of a living-wage factory to produce their collegiate apparel. It meant buying the facility (the first and only factory Knights Apparel owns), rehabbing it for safe working conditions, and then staffing it with employees and managers.

Hodge was up for the challenge.

An Upstate native, he is an experienced executive whose résumé includes stints at WestPoint Stevens, Milliken, and Gerber Childrenswear. Knights Apparel already had a philanthropic arm of its operations called weKAre that supports charities in the Upstate and beyond, including the Children’s Advocacy Center in Spartanburg. Alta Gracia was just the next step in its mission to give back to the community—this time, the global community.

“We felt like someone should do something to support the students,” Hodge says. “We thought someone ought to do it; we felt like we should do it.”

So, they found an old factory in a Dominican Republic industrial zone and bought it, then spent a year getting it started. Last year, they staffed the facility, hired more than 100 workers, and paid them three and a half times the average wage in the Dominican Republic. One of the first things workers did was organize a union, a move embraced by Knights Apparel. The living wage they receive, which was defined by the Workers Rights Consortium, allows workers to do things like have somewhere to live with running water, buy food to feed their families, and save for the future.

“We try our best to be good corporate citizens and support different things in the community,” Hodge says. “My personal opinion is we took that to mean, let’s support this community in the Dominican Republic.”

Not surprisingly, the move was met with support and encouragement by collegians and university officials, many of them already eager to find a way to abandon sweatshop practices, and support, instead, a fair-wage garment factory. Knights Apparel gave them the chance, and the response has been phenomenal. The line launched at 250 stores, and, a year later, Alta Gracia is supplying more than 400 college and university bookstores with “Living Wage—Union Made” t-shirts and sweatshirts.

“It’s really gratifying,” Hodge says, “because it resonates with people what a difference it’s making.”

What does a “living wage” mean? Different things in different places, but in the Dominican Republic, it means about three and a half times what the average worker there is currently earning. So, while the average factory worker makes less than $8,200 a year elsewhere in the Dominican Republic, an Alta Gracia worker will earn nearly $29,000 this year. That allows workers to do things they have never been able to do before, like have indoor plumbing, send their children to school, or build dividers between rooms in their cinderblock homes. They can afford healthcare for the first time in their lives, pay off debts, take paid maternity leave, and buy nutritious food to feed their families. Best of all, they can work fewer hours and still support their families, allowing them to spend time with children and spouses.

Knights Apparel takes a loss on some of these extra costs, but many of them are being recouped through efficiency, lack of turnover, fewer sick days, and high-yield production from a happy and well-trained workforce. Employees manage themselves, in most cases, eliminating the need for lots of higher-wage managerial positions.

The stores where Alta Gracia does best are not in the Upstate, or even in South Carolina, although their t-shirts and hoodies are sold at a dozen Palmetto State schools, including Clemson, USC, Furman, Wofford, and others. Schools like Duke, NYU, Notre Dame, UCLA, Georgetown, Penn State, Yale, and Florida International do the most volume, mostly because these bookstores don’t just carry the brand, they promote it heavily with large signage that includes Alta Gracia’s motto, “Changing Lives, One Shirt at a Time,” as well as prominent store placement.

“A year later, we can say with confidence, that doing good is good business,” the company announced a year after Alta Gracia opened its doors. “And, yes, students do support the brand because it is socially responsible.”

That Alta Gracia is succeeding challenges the very notion that to be competitive in the global apparel marketplace, workers’ rights and wages must be suppressed, according to Georgetown University professors Kline and Soule in their work Alta Gracia: Work with a Salario Digno (a wage with dignity).

Better yet, the dollars earned by the workers of Alta Gracia are extending well beyond the 150 families they support. The Georgetown study shows that this money is being spent at other businesses in the town—banks, grocers, builders, and brick makers—and it is making a noticeable impact. In the meantime, the Workers Rights Consortium continues to monitor factory operations and practices at Alta Gracia to ensure that conditions are safe and healthy, that workers have the right to organize, and that labor standards are being met.

To verify this compliance, the WRC subjects the factory to intensive and ongoing scrutiny, “making it, in all likelihood, the most comprehensively monitored collegiate apparel factory in the world,” the WRC says in its most recent compliance verification report on the factory.

The goal now is to continue growing the brand, and—down the road—possibly expand Alta Gracia’s operations, Hodge says. In the meantime, educators and industry experts will be watching closely to determine if other companies could create similar work environments for their factories.

“Rare indeed are comparable instances where the managers of an apparel manufacturing facility in the developing world prioritize the welfare of its workers over short-term profit maximization,” the Georgetown University report says. “Alta Gracia is a managerial moral exemplar in an industry in which workers have not been accorded the respect they deserve.”

The workers of Alta Gracia have, for the first time in many of their lives, a promising future ahead of them. They are returning to school. Funding new businesses. Supporting their families. But, as the Georgetown University study concludes, Alta Gracia’s highest accomplishment has been laying a foundation that other factories can build upon.

“Over time, the benefits of its intelligent and humane approach to management should be evident, and they should be adaptable to a range of business models and pay scales,” Kline and Soule say. “The long-term promise of Alta Gracia is the light it shines on these possibilities.”

To view the original story featured in TOWN, click here

To view the story in PDF click here 

Her Campus Northeastern - By: Delia Harrington - April 9, 2012.

On Wednesday, April 1, NU kicked off Alta Gracia April on campus with a Tie-Dye Extravaganza (with live music!) from 3-5pm in the Library Quad. You can buy a white Progressive Student Alliance sweatshop-free t-shirt to tie-dye for $10 or bring your own tee to tie-dye for free. With all the momentum for HOWL (Huskies Organizing With Labor) and the fair treatment of our campus workers, it only makes sense for us to care about the workers in other countries who contribute to our Northeastern experience. 

Alta Gracia makes the school apparel we collegiettes love so much—including t-shirts, hoodies and fleeces. What makes Alta Gracia different is the way they care for their (unionized!) workers.  As their website says, “we pay our workers a wage that enables them to provide adequate food, clean water, clothing, shelter, health care, child care, and education for themselves and their families—a ‘living wage’—and hope for a better future.” Sadly, this is not the norm in most developing countries, and even our own minimum wage in America is not actually a living wage in many parts of the country. 

In addition to living wages, Alta Gracia prioritizes the safety of their workers, with masks, fire drills and alarms, and first aid kits on site. They also invite the Works Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent workers-rights watchdog open access to evaluate their factories. While this may sound basic to us, it is out of the ordinary for most of the workers around the globe who make the clothes we love so much. 

I was lucky enough to go to the Alta Gracia factory in the Dominican Republic on the Social Enterprise Institue’s Field Study Program. I talked to workers about how they are treated there compared to with past jobs, and it is a world of difference. After seeing the factory first hand, I was happy to learn that Northeastern and Barnes and Noble College support Alta Gracia by selling their products in our bookstore. 

Luckily, Alta Gracia believes that consumers shouldn’t have to choose between quality, affordable products and doing the right thing, so their apparel is priced competitively. That means Alta Gracia is taking less profit instead of charging you more! This makes it even easier to make the right choice and buy Alta Gracia!

If you want to learn more about this great model for making a profit while upholding the values of humane treatment for workers, come to a screening of Tejid@s Junt@s, Stitched Together: an Alta Gracia Documentary on Wednesday April 18th in West Village G 104 at 8pm.  The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, an Alta Gracia community education representative, and workers from Alta Gracia on Skype!

To see the full details and event listings, check out the event on Facebook!

Invest in Australia - March 26, 2012.

The NSW Government is partnering with the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney to host one of America’s most successful ethical manufacturing leaders, Knights Apparel CEO Joe Bozich, Deputy Premier and Minister for Trade & investment Andrew Stoner said today.

Mr Stoner said Joe Bozich will speak at a public event on campus tomorrow (Tuesday 27 March) and a breakfast roundtable for business and industry leaders on Thursday (29 March).

“Joe Bozich’s visit will be an opportunity for NSW businesses to hear first-hand how the power of ethical business and consumerism can deliver success in one of the most cut-throat areas of global manufacturing,” Mr Stoner said.

“Joe Bozich will share his remarkable story of Alta Gracia, a Knights Apparel garment label in the Dominican Republic which successfully competes on quality while adopting ethical labour standards to protect its workers.

“NSW is developing a Manufacturing Industry Action Plan to support the competitiveness of our manufacturers and we are keen to promote all potential growth opportunities, including in ethical manufacturing.

“The NSW Government is focused on expanding our presence in the US and other key international markets as part of our commitment to rebuild the State’s economy.”

Mr Stoner said Alta Gracia stands apart from competitors as the only apparel brand in the world that has been independently verified to pay a ‘living wage’ to its developing world workers.

“Joe Bozich will share his experiences on how he has helped secure a sustainable pathway out of poverty for workers while also building the Alta Gracia brand and strengthening Knights Apparel’s bottom line,” Mr Stoner said.

“Founded in 2001, Knights Apparel is now the largest supplier of college apparel in the United States, holds exclusive rights with the National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Hockey League (NHL), and has worked with major brands including Disney and NASCAR.”

US Studies Centre head Professor Geoffrey Garrett said Thursday’s ethical supply chains briefing will also feature ethical consumer expert Michael Hiscox, a Visiting Professor at the Centre who is from Harvard University.

“This the latest in a series of best practice events developed by the US Studies Centre and NSW Trade & Investment as part of an ongoing partnership to promote greater economic and cultural links between NSW and the US,” Professor Garrett said.

The Daily Tarheel (University of North Carolina) - By: John Gorsuch and Derek Lochbaum - March 12, 2012.

TO THE EDITOR:
Regarding the March 2 column “Pride in ethical apparel,” UNC remains committed to ensuring that fair labor standards and human rights are respected wherever UNC-branded merchandise is made. Companies producing items bearing UNC marks agree to comply with the University’s Labor Code of Conduct, adopted in 1999, as part of their contracts.

UNC is a member of two international labor monitoring organizations – the Worker Rights Consortium and the Fair Labor Association – devoted to improving working conditions and addressing related issues around the world.

Alta Gracia is based in Spartanburg, S.C. Knights Apparel, its parent company, ranked second in total UNC apparel sold this past fiscal year.

On Feb. 16, UNC, along with the University of Michigan, UCLA and the University of Wisconsin, hosted about 100 collegiate licensees on our campus to discuss and provide additional training on labor code compliance. Speakers included student, faculty and administrator representatives, along with the Knights Apparel vice president for social compliance.

Student Stores honors the University’s commitment to fair labor practices by selling only logo merchandise from licensed vendors. Last year, the store began selling Alta Gracia apparel. Its success at UNC depends on customers’ purchases.

We also believe it’s good business to support reputable N.C. companies. Currently, the store’s largest apparel supplier is Cotton Exchange from Wendell, N.C. Finally, Student Stores and trademark licensing earnings support undergraduate student scholarships and graduate fellowships.

John Gorsuch,
Director, Student Stores
Derek Lochbaum,
Director, Trademarks and Licensing

The Chronical (Duke University) - By Gloria Lloyd - February 8, 2012. In Fall 2010, Duke became the first university to place an order with Alta Gracia, an apparel factory committed to ethical working standards. Eighteen months later, more than 400 universities have followed suit.

According to a recent report by Georgetown University, the University’s initial investment seems to have paid off, leading to high profits and public support. Lead researchers John Kline and Ed Soule determined that Alta Gracia’s apparel sells at the same rate as comparable products and sees the same profit margins as competing brands. Dominican Republic-based Alta Gracia stands apart from its competitor as the first apparel factory to offer employees a living wage.

“Alta Gracia is succeeding,” said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a nonprofit organization of more than 100 colleges who monitor college apparel factory conditions. “This study demonstrates that apparel companies don’t have to make their products in a sweatshop to be successful.”

Jim Wilkerson, director of trademark licensing and stores operations at Duke, said he is not surprised at the findings.

To view the whole story click here.

The Observer (Notre Dame University) - By Sam Stryker - January 19, 2012.  As students pack Notre Dame Stadium next fall, not only will they be cheering on the Irish in style, but they will also be doing so in a socially conscious fashion.

For the first time ever, The Shirt Project is announcing the identity of their vendor: Alta Gracia Apparel. The company will further the tradition of The Shirt Project, promoting both Notre Dame's tradition and socially conscious identity.
Junior Andrew Alea, president of The Shirt Project, said Alta Gracia Apparel went beyond The Shirt's usual tradition of supporting the Notre Dame community.

"The Alta Gracia brand is a socially conscious brand. The shirts are manufactured in a town in the Dominican Republic called Alta Gracia," he s

aid. "They pay their workers a living wage, which is basically enough to feed, clothe and house their entire family."
Alea said proceeds from The Shirt would go back to students in various ways, ranging from covering medical costs to funding additional clubs and organizations. Revenues would also help pay for students who could not otherwise afford to participate in campus activities, according to the project's website.

"It's an added message to The Shirt," he said. "In addition to contributing back to the University, now we are contributing back to the world in a sense."

Alea said he thinks Notre Dame students will appreciate the social significance this year's Shirt will have.
"By supporting The Shirt, you're not only supporting Notre Dame student body clubs and activities, but supporting a living wage in the Dominican Republic, which is actually a cool message to have," he said.

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