Duke University - Duke Today By Bryan Roth - November 23, 2010
DURHAM, NC --For more than 100 factory workers in the Dominican Republic, all it took was one person to make a life-changing difference.
For the past 13 years, Jim Wilkerson, Duke's director of trademark licensing and Duke Stores, has been a national leader in lobbying for improved factory conditions around the globe, helping to establish labor standards and organizations to defend the rights of workers who make clothes particularly items bearing the logos of Duke and other universities.
This summer, his efforts led to a breakthrough, when the first apparel factory in a developing nation to pay a living wage opened to employ 120 employees. The factory is in Altagracia, about a 40-minute drive from the Dominican Republic's capital of Santo Domingo.
"I've never seen more motivated, productive and appreciative group of workers in my life," said Wilkerson, who traveled to the factory in September. "Workers continually talked about the hope, promise and improvement in life that their job affords them now. They kept saying how they never thought anything like this was possible."
To open the groundbreaking factory that pays each worker a living wage, American apparel company Knights Apparel worked closely with the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor rights monitoring organization of which Duke is a member. Wilkerson has served on the consortium's board of directors for the last seven years and spearheaded a number of labor rights initiatives since 1997. Among the initiatives was drafting the nation's first comprehensive code of conduct for university apparel and representing Duke as the first university member of President Bill Clinton's Apparel Industry Partnership.
Wilkerson's code of conduct was the basis for the decision to create a fair-wage factory. He also was involved in discussions with the Workers Rights Consortium and Knights Apparel as they partnered to open the factory. Read Full Story
