Brown will maintain its membership in FLA and WRC

Brown University will continue its membership in the Fair Labor Association and the Worker Rights Consortium and will remain productively engaged in issues related to sweatshop conditions in the apparel industry.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — President Sheila E. Blumstein today announced that Brown University would remain an active and vocal member of the Fair Labor Association (FLA) and the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), two national organizations dedicated to eliminating labor abuses in the apparel industry. Brown is a charter member of both organizations.

Blumstein made her announcement in a memo to a committee of students and administrators which advises the president on sweatshop issues. On Friday, that committee submitted a report which discussed the University’s membership in both organizations and presented reasons why Brown should withdraw from the FLA.

“I do not intend to dismiss [these] issues or to treat them lightly,” Blumstein wrote to the committee. “By participating as an active and outspoken member of the FLA’s University Advisory Council, Brown has a voice it otherwise would not have, as well as the opportunity to build coalitions of universities and colleges around particular issues.”

Blumstein requested that the committee continue to meet and focus on developing a strategy for the University to build alliances with other institutions, effect positive results from both the FLA and the WRC, and to press the FLA, as well as colleagues on the FLA’s University Advisory Council, to address a number of perceived inadequacies, which are outlined in the report from the committee.

Copies of Blumstein’s memo and the committee’s report are available from the News Service.