Universities, apparel companies make millions from clothing made for poverty wages

Welcome to another episode of Behind the Headlines, where we feature experts and journalists discussing a variety of topics. In this latest episode, Hayleigh Colombo, a reporter for Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team, talks about her story on logo apparel for colleges and the labor that is being used to produce the clothing.

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Broken threads: College clothing made in factories rife with labor violations, poverty wages

About this program

Host Terry Lipshetz is a senior producer for Lee Enterprises. Besides producing interviews for this Behind the Headlines program, he produces the daily Hot off the Wire news podcast, co-hosts Streamed & Screened movies and television program and is the producer of Across the Sky weather and climate podcast.

Lee Enterprises produces many national, regional and sports podcasts. Learn more here.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Terry Lipshetz: Welcome to another episode of behind the Headlines, where we feature experts and journalists discussing a variety of topics. I'm Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer for Lee Enterprises and your host in this latest episode, Haley Colombo, reporter for Lee Enterprise's public service journalism team, talks about her story on logo apparel for colleges and the labor that is being used to produce the clothing. Haley, welcome to the program.

Hayleigh Colombo: Thanks so much for having me.

Terry Lipshetz: Hayleigh, can you provide just an overall synopsis of what this story is about? Because it felt like there was a lot of pieces in it.

Hayleigh Colombo: I think it's important for people to know when they go to the university bookstore on football Saturday and they're buying a new T shirt or whatever to represent their favorite team, I think we make a lot of those buying decisions and don't necessarily think about what all went into it. What all went into making that shirt that is now on, the rack at my favorite university and being sold for $30 or whatever. $25. And what all went into it is this incredibly it takes an incredibly complex global labor supply chain to make those clothes, to bring them to consumers. And the reality is that the people who had the hardest job in making that shirt were compensated leap. And often those workers are getting poverty level wages that are hard for them to subsist on in their home countries making the US equivalent of a dollar 2 /hour which is even in countries where it costs less. To live or the expenses are less. It's still not enough for them to have a good life, to have the even calories that they need to subsist on. And there's lots of abuses that take place in these apparel factories, whether it's people not having the right to form a union or, when they try to form a union being retaliative against for that, sexual harassment, wage theft. And our universities, which are some of our most well known brands and most important institutions in this country, they themselves are, profiting off of this system because they earn millions of dollars of royalties from the sale of this gear. So we wanted to kind of delve into the conditions that this year is being made under and delve into what, if anything, universities have done, are doing to ensure that the people who actually make the garments with their logos on it are being treated fairly.

Terry Lipshetz: You had an interesting anecdote early in the story about a factory worker from Honduras. Can you talk a little bit about that example that you used about the working conditions and his wages?

Hayleigh Colombo: Yeah, absolutely. So I spoke with famous demas Michael Cardona Bar, and he is a worker in a factory that makes Nike gear. so he had recently worked on a University of Arizona alumni t shirt that Nike is selling for or that the university bookstores or retailers are selling for $35. He has to make upwards of works on upwards of, like, 750 to 1000 of those shirts a day, and he makes the equivalent of $97 a week. essentially that shirt, college football fans who are buying that shirt are paying more for it than he makes in a single day. And I think it's important to understand that that wage is not adequate for him to have a middle class lifestyle. He struggles to make ends meet, even though his wife is working. He has two young kids. One of his kids is a little bit younger than one of mine. So we were talking about, you know, he said it's not enough money to maintain his, you know, brands like Nike are profiting handsomely off of the sale of this gear. brands and retailers like the markup on the shirt is about 70%. Meanwhile, workers earn 1% or less of the final cost of the shirt in workers like him. And advocates in this industry, advocates fighting for fair wages, have pointed out that brands and retailers could ensure that workers are being paid fairly. They're profiting handsomely off of it.

Terry Lipshetz: Did you get any feedback from apparel companies?

Hayleigh Colombo: They largely didn't want to talk about this issue. Nike didn't respond to multiple requests for comment, even, about specific issues that had come up in their other brands that we reached out to. Kind of sent back statements, I would say, about, oh, we care about their treatment of worker. And I don't want to say that they don't, but I think that they don't feel a lot of impetus, apparently, to change the situation. And there are a lot of people suffering under this system. Experts that I talked with, who study the global apparel industry have noted that, in order to pay workers a fair living wage for them, it would really not drastically impact the cost of a t shirt. Even if they pass 100% of the cost on to consumers. It would add, like a dollar or something like that. Obviously, you could debate whether consumers should pay the full cost of doing something like that, or brands and retailers should eat into their profit a little bit to cover that. But it wouldn't be a drastic investment that they would have to make in order to write the ship.

Terry Lipshetz: And, there's not really a lot of pressure, it seems, right now, to write that ship.

Hayleigh Colombo: There's been kind of waxing and waning pressure over the last several decades. There was in the early 2000s, when after US. Manufacturing of clothing declined, and more and more clothing started being manufactured overseas in these low wage countries, there was a big outcry about how apparel was being made. I don't know if people remember, like, Kathy Lee Gifford got into a lot of hot water back in the day for her clothing brand. And there have been various disasters have happened. Horrible disasters have happened over the years. In 2013, a Bangladesh building collapsed, it's kind of known as the Rana Plaza disaster. And more than 1000 people died, largely garment workers. And it's the worst disaster that the industry has ever known. So when situations like that happen, yes, there's a large outcry, but by and large, obviously there's really not. Consumers are kind of going about their day, consumers are cash strapped as well. I'm in the same way, I'm not trying to pay as much as possible to buy a t shirt. You try to get the best thing you can for the least amount of money to fit in your budget. And I've talked with folks who have said it really shouldn't be on consumers, it should be on the brands and retailers, as well as the large institutional buyers like universities, or like professional sports teams who put that pressure on the brands and retailers to change their practices.

Terry Lipshetz: The fact that this story is about universities is interesting because obviously division, one level universities are big money makers with football programs and basketball programs, and it's not professional sports, but there's a lot of money in it, like professional sports, and you get crowds of 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 or more going to football games. So it's a huge industry. But at the same time, many of these large schools are also research universities. They study things like labor practices. And it's kind of an interesting situation. So what kind of responsibility do universities bear here?

Hayleigh Colombo: It's so interesting. And one of the reasons why we focused on university gear when this problem exists across all apparel, every time you buy a shirt that insert retailer of your choice, the same issues are at play. The difference with the university apparel is that they are public facing, publicly funded, most of the time, obviously, there's private universities, but publicly funded by taxpayers, institutions of higher learning, where, like you're saying, some of the same institutions that have apparel that's being produced under unfair conditions, those same institutions have professors, there who are studying this issue. Experts have said that, universities do play a big role in trying to correct this. And to their credit, to the extent that anyone has tried to improve this, universities have. And so I talked to university officials too, who are kind of begrudging the fact that people are asking us to do more, but we're really the only folks who are doing anything right. What else can we do? What we discovered is the investment of time. The people who are really engaged in this, it's really not uniform across universities. There's a core group of universities who are really engaged in this work and really seem to care about it, and are trying to, use the leverage that they have. But there's a lot of universities, I would venture to say most based on our research, who don't appear to be engaged in this and are large, but themselves could play a role. Could be another voice asking brand of choice to ensure that workers are paid fairly.

Terry Lipshetz: Do sponsorships complicate the issue? Because you have like Nike and Adidas and all these brands will be the official shoe sponsor of such and such college football team or the basketball team or whatever. Are these relationships complicating the issue as well?

Hayleigh Colombo: Absolutely they are, because Nike, these other companies, depending on the school, they're paying a million dollars, multiple million dollars every year, in the form of these deals. And that really, I mean they're important business partners of the university. So it's tricky because it's this symbiotic relationship. What's worth more to the university, the deal being in good standing with Nike or appeasing, some students who know activists regarding sweatshop apparel.

Terry Lipshetz: Right. You had the interview with the worker from Honduras. You referenced the building collapse in Bangladesh. I know your story references a case in Bangkok, Thailand. Also, you have these factories in so many different countries. Is this complicating the situation as well? Because it's not like everybody is working in the same country and they're all making apparel in one place. So how is that complicating the situation?

Hayleigh Colombo: It's incredibly complicated. Honestly, researching this subject, my mind was truly blown about how complex the global supply chain is. I mean thousands of factories are involved. Schools have hundreds of licensees, who each have their own set of factories that they use. So it's really hard to track because it is very hard to know. I spent a lot of time trying to kind of track a specific shirt and find out which factory that shirt was made in. It is so hard to know. It's almost impossible to know. I was going through these importing logs, trying to find these shipments that would give any sort of clue about, okay, this factory had an order that came to the US with Adidas or Nike as the customer and what was in that order? And it'll just say like men's knit tops or something. And it's like, it's very hard to track. Or obviously any shirt that you're buying, it'll say, or piece of apparel that you're buying on the physical tag, it will know made in Honduras, made in Thailand, made in Bangladesh. But it doesn't give any more details, than there's, you know, hundreds, if not more factories in all these countries. So it's just really hard for folks to monitor. It's really hard for universities. I mean universities are not in the business of monitoring factories in Thailand. They're just not. So it's hard to know. And what makes it even more complicated is that brands themselves don't really own their own factories. That's not really a thing. They're all subcontractors. So it's like, okay, these are the hundreds of facilities. That where Nike gear is made. But it's not like these people are employees of Nike or employees of Adidas or Under Armour or whoever. So it makes it really hard to track, and it also makes it really hard for anyone to really, truly accept accountability for what happens in these places. Because the university can say, like, well, this was the brand that we worked with. And the brand can say, well, this is the Subcontractor that we use. and sometimes those subcontractors are their subcontracting out to other factories. So in the case of the Rana Plaza disaster, for instance, some brands were surprised that their gear was being made there. There was like, tags in the rubble and just some horrifying images where you would see this gear, this shirt was made there. And the brands themselves didn't even know because that was a, Subcontractor. Subcontractor was sewing the sleeves or something. And there's just tremendous, with an industry that fragmented, there's tremendous pressure on the factories themselves to have labor costs as low as possible.

Terry Lipshetz: I mean, you don't want to provide excuses for businesses, but in some ways, it's also difficult for them. They can claim like, well, we hired the Subcontractor and they say, we're operating on the up and up. But if they're not doing it because they're not employees of these manufacturers, then it is tougher for them to monitor too.

Hayleigh Colombo: Right? Absolutely, it absolutely is. I think that, advocates would say, well, yeah, it is tough, but it's also brands and retailers who have chosen to organize themselves this way, to chosen to use Subcontractors that they don't track very well. All of this is a choice, and it's a choice that's being made in search of higher and higher profits.

Terry Lipshetz: So what's next? Are you going to continue looking at this story? Are there other angles that you're pursuing?

Hayleigh Colombo: I hope so. Honestly, it's been so fascinating. It's really been so fascinating. I definitely want to keep reporting on it. I think that it's fascinating to see what, if any, solutions people have come up with. So one really fascinating past solution was that there was a fair trade university logo factory. It’s called alta gracias in the Dominican Republic. And universities, for a time being, when Alta Gracia was up and running, they would have displays in the store like, okay, all these people are, earning fair wages. They were like, on average, three times the minimum wage or something like that. They had union collective bargaining rights, they were working in good conditions. And that factory unfortunately, closed after COVID. And so what other that was obviously such a creative solution that it was kind of a private sector solution. And it did appear to make a difference, or at least show that this model could work. it successfully worked for many years, but the COVID pandemic was kind of the nail in the coffin there. In the past, there was an effort to have something called a designated suppliers program where it would really clamp down on the number of factories that did produce university logo gear so that the universities could have a really strong oversight of those factories and what went on there. And that was the solution that a lot of the really involved universities were really hoping for, but that ran into some US. Antitrust issues and never came to fruition. So what's the next, private sector creative solution? Is there government is there ever going to be government intervention to solve this problem, or is this just a problem that we've accepted as a society as kind of the cost of doing business? I hope not, because in the reporting, it became very clear to me people are really suffering for something, as simple as us being like, oh, yeah, I'll pick up a new t shirt, like a new alma mater T shirt. Like, there's really like, there's people who are behind that who are not living good lives, and that doesn't have to be true.

Terry Lipshetz: Well, on that note, Haley, appreciate you coming on today to talk about this and certainly going to think a little bit differently the next time I pick up local apparel from either a, pro or college team. And it does give me something to think about.

Hayleigh Colombo: Absolutely. Thanks so much, Terry.

Terry Lipshetz: We hope you enjoyed this latest episode of behind the Headlines. You can find us on every podcast platform, and we'd love it if you could take a moment to subscribe and leave a review. Finally, if you appreciate what we're doing with this program, we encourage you to invest in local journalism by supporting the newspaper in your community. I'm Terry Lipshetz. Thanking you so much for listening to behind the Headlines from Lee Enterprise.

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Behind the Headlines features interviews with reporters and editors from newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises, including its Public Service Journalism team. Lee Enterprises is a leading provider of local news and information, and a major platform for advertising, with daily newspapers, rapidly-growing digital products, marketing services, innovative technology and nearly 350 weekly and specialty publications serving 77 markets in 26 states.