The worker rights consortium lets make Birmingham the first UK University to sign up!

There is motion going through on this next guild concil, I have written the below so you can get a better understanding of what it is about, I'm happy to answer any questions.

Launched last year this group is fast becoming a amazing success story, its already protected thousands of worker around the world and helped them get a fair wage and decent representation. 186 university have signed up and the group is fast spreading, just within the last few weeks 4 Canadian universities became the first to join in Canada

This group is set up as monitoring organization to guarantee the implementation by large brands and their sub contractors of the standards that the university requires of them.

Currently there is a wide gap, between the requirements of consumers and the actions on the ground of factories owners, sub contracted out to sub contractors of big brands. As I’m sure you all know large brands do not accept responsibility for the actions of doubly sub contracted producers and it is a system in which a great many abuses and lapses take place.

For example just this in 2009, locals protesting against a mine where hooded, shackled and beaten, toxic waste was dumped in west Africa by a oil firm and 1800 people where sacked for trying to unionize at a factory that makes university hoodies in Honduras, this same group has also been shown to have a policy of firing pregnant women, the last group being a company that sells to both the university and guild of students.

The point is that while we all agree to these standards, there is no monitoring body and no global strategic frameworks in place for ensuring they are met in supply chains that have greatly deferred responsibility.

This body has been set up and has been very successful already. In fact just last week it got the jobs back of the 1800 workers who were sacked for unionizing, a fair wage for them and the right to unionize and a fair wage 7 other factories run by the same company in the country.

The workers rights consortium monitors and mediates the implementation of these standards and reports back to universities on the pace of improvement. By joining the workers rights consortium, the university would be pooling its bargaining power that it holds via large procurement contracts with 186 other universities from all over the world.

Signing up would involve no change in supplier simply the better monitoring of that suppliers work and a better mediation between workers and large accountable companies, the WRC has the full support of the FLO and Fairtrade Foundation.