Russell Athletic rehires workers

UNC could reconsider its relationship with Russell Athletic after the company announced plans last week to rehire workers — an action for which several students have advocated since last year.

The company is rehiring the 1,200 local workers it displaced when it closed a factory in Honduras in January. The workers had recently unionized.

Almost 100 universities, including UNC in March, suspended licensing agreements that allowed Russell Athletic to use their logos on clothing and merchandise.

If officials decide to act on the news, UNC’s decision could be reconsidered in March.

“It’s not a full-blown conclusion what we would do at that time,” said Dwayne Pinkney, associate vice chancellor for finance and administration at UNC and a member of the licensing labor code advisory committee.

The pressure to suspend the agreements, including at UNC, came mostly from student groups, who picketed and wrote letters to their university administrators.

UNC students protested at the licensing committee meeting the month before the University ended its contract, citing a lack of compliance with UNC’s labor code.

UNC earned $61,274 in 2007-08 from its contract with Russell Athletic. Total revenue from licensing agreements in that time was $3.6 million.

Although several calls to Russell Athletic for comment on why the factory opened were unanswered, several people who voiced opposition to the company’s treatment of workers said universities’ suspended agreements prompted the company’s actions.

Some are calling Russell Athletic’s decision the biggest student-led labor rights victory so far.

“It’s pretty amazing. This has not ever happened before on this scale,” said Dida El-Sourady, a UNC senior on the student board of the Worker Rights Consortium, a national nonprofit agency that monitors factory conditions.

El-Sourady and other students urged the UNC system to boycott Russell. UNC-Asheville and N.C. State University also boycotted the company.

“Twelve hundred people are getting their jobs back, and these people had been blacklisted for their union activity,” El-Sourady said. “We can really make a huge impact.”

In a statement released Tuesday, Russell also said that it plans to cooperate with the workers.

Russell originally cited the economic climate as its reason for closing the factory and said it would be financially impossible for them to reopen, said United Students Against Sweatshops national organizer Jack Mahoney.

“Actually it was viable, it was just a matter of will,” Mahoney said.



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