United Students against Sweatshops (USAS) is a network of students in North America who have been organizing for workers’ rights since 1998.
As former, current, and future workers, we recognize that we must live the principles that we are taught in the classroom now. As students, we have the power to force our universities to respect the basic human rights and dignity of workers who make our education possible.
We believe our universities must respect all workers in their supply chains– from those who serve us food in the dining halls, to housekeepers and janitors who clean our dormitories, to farmworkers who pick the food we eat in those dining halls, to the garment workers who make apparel with our universities’ name. We support the right of all workers to organize unions and other democratic worker organizations, to earn living wages that meet the basic needs of their families, and to be treated with respect. We believe workers are the best monitors of their own condition in North America and around the globe and deserve a voice on the job.
We define "sweatshop" broadly and use it as a representation of the horrific abuses of the global economy. However, human rights abuses and the repression of working people’s struggles is not limited to garment factories in the Global South or in immigrant communities in North America. Sweatshop conditions exist in the fields, in the prisons, on our campuses, in the power relations of a flawed global system. Thus, we consider all struggles for a better world and an alternative to the current structure of the global economy to be directly or by analogy a struggle against sweatshops.
To get involved in Campus and Community Solidarity Campaigns: e-mail
\n salma@usasnet.org
To get involved in Sweatfree Campus Campaigns (including the struggle for the Designated Suppliers Program): e-mail
\n rod@usasnet.org
If you are a high school student and would like to get involved: e-mail
\n shaun@usasnet.org
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VIDEO
JAPAN SWEATSHOPS: TOYOTA