Maritza Vargas and Elba Nurys used to work for a Nike sweatshop nestled in the small Dominican village of Alta Gracia making caps sold in university stores nationwide. They worked with no job security, endured verbal and physical abuse and were regularly forced to work late into the night. Ten years later, Vargas and Nurys work for a new company in dignified conditions.
On Sunday night, Vargas and Nurys spoke in the Christian Association and shared their story — how their alliance with university students has allowed them to go from working in poor sweatshop conditions to the model factory for the entire Caribbean region — which produces merchandise sold in the Penn Bookstore.
The program, which was hosted by hosted by the Student Labor Action Project, began with an exercise in raising awareness about sweatshop conditions. SLAP member and Wharton senior Max Cohen led the activity, asking attendees to reflect on their clothing.
“We don’t know where the clothes come from,” College freshman Brendan Van Gorder said. “We know very little about production or how the clothes were made.”
Cohen explained, “the activity emphasized that we live in a world where our lifestyles depend on processes many stages apart, and it’s rare to hear people involved many stages away.”
Vargas and Nurys were fired from the BJ&B factory when they tried to advocate for better standards in their working environment. Jobless and blacklisted, they joined forces with United Students Against Sweatshops, a national student organization, and the Workers Rights Consortium, an independent monitoring organization.
A student-led campaign — in which USAS pressured college administrators to boycott companies using unfair working conditions — successfully pushed BJ&B to rehire the two women, but the factory later closed. Alta Gracia, the town where the factory had been located, “became a ghost town once the factory shut down,” Vargas said.
The WRC found another company, Knights Apparel, willing to reopen a college clothing factory in Alta Gracia. This new factory was an experiment — a prototype for all factories in developing nations by allowing unions, WRC oversight and paying wages 3.5 times higher than minimum wage.
The Dominican women addressed their audience of 20 in their native Spanish, and Teresa Cheng, national organizer for the USAS, translated for the non-Spanish speaking students.
Many students found the workers’ candid presentation particularly compelling.
“I learned about [poor working conditions] in an ethics class in high school, but it was much more real hearing about it from the workers,” College freshman Emma Biegacki said.
SLAP member and College senior Ellie Dugan praised the impactful delivery. “A lot of times groups raise awareness indirectly, but we were lucky to hear directly from [Vargas and Nurys], natural in Spanish, straight from the source,” Dugan said.
“It’s all about students exercising power as students and making that change happen,” College junior Moshe Bitterman said.
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