Last week, students raised questions in The Mirror about the origin of clothes sold in the bookstore.
Barbara Farrell, the store’s general manager, said that the bookstore does make sure clothes sold there are not from sweatshop labor.
“We can verify the origins of the clothing. We can tell you exactly where they come from,” said Farrell.
Farrell is employed by Follett Higher Education Group, which pays a fee to lease and operate Fairfield’s bookstore. Seven hundred universities across America also hire Follett to manage their bookstores, but Follett is simply a retailer and does not produce apparel or employ manufacturers.
However, Follett still has watchdog agencies that visit the apparel production sites every few months to determine the treatment of workers and conditions of the sites, according to Farrell.
She said the second paragraph of the article that read, “Follett…cannot guarantee that the clothing sold in the Fairfield bookstore was constructed in good working conditions” was taken out of context from an e-mail written to a Mirror reporter from Follett’s Vice President of Public and Campus Relations Clifford Ewert.
“We can’t guarantee 100 percent [that workers are treated fairly], but no one can guarantee anything 100 percent. But we do everything possible within our control to deal with non-authorized sweatshops that have desperate conditions and poor wages.”
If the sites do not let the agencies in or fail inspections, they are dropped from Follett’s list of acceptable sites and no longer used. When the issue of poor labor conditions arose about six years ago, Follett had a litany of sites, but scrapped the ones that proved to be inadequate upon visiting them.
Farrell said the statement “Often such clothing is manufactured in sweatshops with an average salary of six cents a day” is true, but Fairfield does not sell such clothing. Follett only purchases goods from sites that treat and pay their workers fairly, she said.
Both Students for Social Justice and the bookstore desire for Fairfield to join the Worker’s Rights Consortium, they said, but the decision is up to the university.
However, Farrell thinks the university will be joining soon, because Rev. Jeffrey von Arx, S.J. is coming from a Jesuit institution and Rev. Aloysius P. Kelley, S.J. recently visited Nicaragua with the mission volunteers.
“Trips like those often pull curtains back. I’m sure he’ll be supportive,” said Farrell, who has worked to join the WRC with Students for Social Justice.
In May, Farrell is taking a trip with Fairfield’s mission volunteers to help migrant workers in Mexico. She plans on visiting orphanages as well.
“There are so many mission groups at Fairfield. Obviously there are people who care a lot here. We [Follett] are guests wherever we are. We try to adapt to the culture of the college, and the culture at Fairfield is evident,” she said
She said Follett may be portrayed poorly because of statistics from other companies’ Web sites.
“You can go to NikeWages.com and it’ll list you statistics. But you can’t just lift a statistic and call it your own,” Farrell said.
Farrell stressed that abandoning work sites will not necessarily help the people in third world countries.
She brought up the example of Nike shutting down a sweatshop after the company learned of the desperate conditions. The village starved without the wages from the sweatshop.
She says efforts should be made to change the conditions, decrease working hours and increase wages. According to Farrell, that is “what Follett is all about.”
“I was initially very upset with the article because we have spent so much time on this,” said Farrell. “The bottom line is a lot is being done to clean conditions up.”
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