New Archive:

November Issue

By Jess Champagne

I spent Yom Kippur last year in my friend Tom's apartment in New York. I had taken the train down from New Haven to participate in a press conference announcing the results of a fact-finding delegation to El Salvador, and I had come down early to avoid traveling on Yom Kippur.

On that delegation, sponsored by United Students Against Sweatshops and the National Labor Committee, I met with a few of the men and women who sewed clothing for Kathie Lee Gifford, Yale, and other formidable American institutions. Most people I talked with were working to speak out and form unions despite the risks, the company guards, and government complicity.

One man had suffered a death threat, and several women had been fired and blacklisted--left with no way to feed their children. I was there to call attention to the dangers and abuses they faced, and to try to bring them some guarantee of safety.

As I pulled out my prayerbook in Tom's living room to glance through it before going to sleep, I saw the Haftarah from Isaiah,which says that the fast G-d desires is not one in which "you pursue business as usual, and oppress your workers."

Suddenly drawn to the text, I read on. "If you remove from your midst the yoke of oppression . . . then shall your light shine in the darkness, and your gloom shall be as noonday."

I think Tom and my other activist friends thought it somewhat strange when I began waving a prayerbook and quoting a prophet, but I was reinvigorated, reminded yet again that my social justice work was part of a long history of Jews fighting economic inequality and injustice and, more specifically, struggling for workers' rights.

The first concrete reminder of this connection had been two years before at the Smithsonian exhibit about sweatshop history. As I walked through the exhibit, I noticed that the protest signs of the early 20th century garment workers in the photographs were all in Yiddish.

I went on to learn from friends about Clara Lemlich, the teenager who called (in Yiddish) for the general strike of shirtwaist makers in New York in the 20s, and about Jewish friends' parents and grandparents who had grown up in the labor movement.

I had become interested in the struggle against sweatshops in high school, when I read in my local paper that sweatshops were more than history. My strong reactions to the abuses I read about and my determination to fight them were rooted in the Jewish and humanist ideals my parents had taught me--in the idea that we each have an obligation to work toward a just society, for tzedakah, justice.

I didn't find a way to fight these sweatshops until I came to college and found a nascent anti-sweatshop group. The movement was just getting started, but it was clear that we'd found a special opportunity to change the garment industry. We'd found a segment of the industry that we could directly affect university-licensed clothes, like Yale T-shirts and Michigan baseball caps.

Plus, I wasn't the only student shocked into action by sweatshop abuses or my connection to them as a buyer and wearer of sweatshop goods. The anti-sweatshop movement quickly reached critical mass and has become a national movement with groups at over 150 campuses.

We've found a direct way to support people who are linked to us through the obscure supply chains of the global economy--the people whose labor was embodied in the clothes we wore but whose faces we might never see.

My junior year, after a year and a half of negotiating with our university president and countless hours of educating and mobilizing students to pressure the Yale administration, Students Against Sweatshops at Yale finally saw some results. We had Xeroxed fliers, made coffee dates with potential supporters, built bridges to student and community groups, met with professors, and repeated our arguments countless times to every person possible.

We even brought over one of my friends from El Salvador to speak about her experiences working in a factory that produced Yale T-shirts, a feat of fundraising and turnout that I never thought we'd pull off.

The event was cosponsored by a new group called Jews for Justice. We organized a forum so that SAS and the administration could each share our arguments with the student body. Yale's president, as usual, refused to attend, but we filled the room with students and emerged with them on our side.

We held a rally on a cold, rainy October day and delivered a massive check for three cents--the labor cost of a Yale T-shirt made in El Salvador--to our president. The Yale administration finally agreed to require that companies reveal where Yale clothing is made. They began talking more seriously about ways to make sure that workers were being treated right, but they still weren't taking real action.

During an uneasonably snowy April, SAS began a sleepout outside the administration office. They remained for two weeks despite threats of arrest (holding a Shabbat dinner halfway through), and used the resulting publicity to educate the student body and to convince our student government to hold a referendum about Yale licensing, in which Students Against Sweatshops won a clear majority.

Unfortunately, the Yale administration continues to refuse to join the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an institution that was founded by USAS and other groups fighting for workers' rights in the U.S. and in the countries where this clothing is produced. The WRC would ensure that companies respect workers' basic rights and that they work in coalition with local groups striving to protect these rights.

Instead, Yale remains wedded to the so-called Fair Labor Association (FLA), an industry-dominated group that refuses to call for a living wage for workers and for openness about what is happening in the factories and how they are being monitored. The FLA, which is being pushed hard by Nike and other corporations, will cover up these abuses while making cosmetic changes at best in factory conditions.

We're continuing to fight this policy at Yale and around the country, and continuing to find new ways to support workers' struggles for self-determination. It's often a frustrating fight, but it's also energizing to see how many people have learned and become passionate about these abuses since I became involved.

At Yale, I've found a small community of people who share my values as a Jew and an activist. I hope that I will continue to maintain these sources of inspiration and strength as I continue to follow the model of people like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who commented at the Selma civil rights march that "my legs were praying."

Jess Champagne is a former member of the United Students Against Sweatshops Coordinating Committee and a cofounder of Jews for Justice at Yale. She is currently exploring opportunities to return to Indonesia or work for social justice in the US after she finishes her senior year.

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