Instead of taking vacations to the coast, going on road trips or visiting relatives, two University graduates spent their summers in Indonesia visiting with factory workers who make various University products, including hats, clothing and stuffed animals.
Now back from their trip, Chad Sullivan and Agatha Schmaedick will speak about their summer experiences in “Eating Our Own Tears, Sweating in Indonesia,” tonight in 110 Willamette. This is the first presentation in a weekly lecture series about worker rights sponsored by the United Students Against Sweatshops.
Sullivan and Schmaedick spent three months in Indonesia interviewing factory workers and documenting their research with video footage and photographs. Sullivan said they will be sharing their research tonight with a PowerPoint presentation and a short video featuring the workers they met . He said they talked with workers at 12 factories who made products for Adidas, Nike, Gap, Old Navy and other companies.
“A lot of the workers were young and mostly women,” he said. “They were working in some of the harshest conditions. A lot of times it was their first job.”
Sullivan said many of the workers could speak for hours about their jobs and were definitely not happy with them. He said a lot of the workers had to work overtime, sometimes causing injuries.
Sullivan said he and Schmaedick wanted to present the lives of the workers accurately in the workers’ own words.
“It was a really amazing experience,” he said. “It was very powerful to see their courage.”
The duo hopes their presentation will inspire people to take some actions, Sullivan said. He added that after Nike CEO Phil Knight’s monetary return to the University, they want people to know Nike hasn’t stopped exploiting its workers.
“There is no moral justification in any kind of relationship with Nike in my opinion,” Sullivan said. “Not to say we should boycott their products, because that’s not what the workers want, but we shouldn’t be proud.”
Randy Newnham, co-director of the Survival Center, said students can look at Sullivan and Schmaedick and see they are students, just like themselves, and realize they can also bring social change.
“It’s important for students to see the people out there making change are people just like themselves,” he said.
Greg Dusic, member of USAS, said because students are a huge consumer group, it is important for them to see what the people making their clothes are like.
“This is an opportunity to go and ‘meet’ the people who make your clothes and make the connection with yourself, the clothes you are buying and the people who make them,” Sullivan said, “even though it’s halfway around the world.
“It’s a very far-reaching problem we’re talking about.”