Home > Baseball Begins to Listen to Sweatshop Foes
by Dave Zirin & Derek Tyner
Major League Baseball’s All-Star game is supposed to be
a breezy exhibition of the sport’s brightest stars. It’s
also a place for baseball’s corporate patrons to be
wined, dined and reassured about the current state of
the game.
But at this year’s All-Star game in Pittsburgh, the
party was crashed by a bull-headed group of about
seventy activists determined to change the way the
corporate game is played. The Pittsburgh Anti-Sweatshop
Community Alliance (PASCA) held a spirited rally outside
Tuesday’s game at PNC Park followed by a march to
Roberto Clemente Bridge. The procession was a
celebration of something anti-sweatshop activists had
never been able to claim with Major League Baseball:
Real progress.
For several years, PASCA has tried to get the Pirates to
address the unfair working conditions in some of the
factories where their apparel is produced. For several
years they’ve been treated the way other National League
teams treat the Pirates: like a doormat. But as the All-
Star Game approached, PASCA’s dogged work finally paid
off.
A citywide debate was ignited when the Pittsburgh Post-
Gazette recognized PASCA’s work in a recent editorial
that asked, "Would you mind if that Pittsburgh Pirates
shirt you bought last week was sewn by a fourteen-year-
old girl in Bangladesh during her twelfth hour of labor
in a factory that pays her in pocket change?"
Baseball’s initial response was to go on the attack. In
a letter to Pittsburgh activist Tim Stevens, Ethan
Orlinsky, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for
Major League Baseball Properties, said MLB was "proud of
the accomplishments of our licensees [who] provide
gainful employment to tens of thousands of people, in
all cases in what we understand to be full compliance
with all applicable labor laws" and asserted that
"statements criticizing Major League Baseball and MLBP’s
licensees for engaging ’sweatshop’ labor are without
merit."
Orlinsky demanded that PASCA supply concrete proof of
sweatshop abuses. They were ready. Anti-sweatshop
leaders responded in writing to even offering to help
set-up a proper mechanism for monitoring and enforcement
of labor rights.
Bjorn Claeson, Director of SweatFree Communities, a
national network of anti-sweatshop organizers that
includes PASCA, told us, "It’s mind-boggling that
someone representing Major League Baseball can make
these claims at this day and age. They can listen to one
of their own licensees, or probably several of their
licensees, who are now publicly admitting to a series of
chronic human rights violations."
Scott Nova, Executive Director of the Workers’ Rights
Consortium, which monitors the production of apparel for
colleges and universities, also says that there’s no
longer a dispute about "the central fact that there
continue to be substantial labor rights violations in
the supply chains of major sports apparel brands."
All of this wrangling served to keep the issue in the
public eye. On the morning of the big game, the
Pittsburgh City Council passed a resolution urging
"companies and organizations that...have benefited from
the continuous support of this city...to behave in a
way...consistent with the morals and values of the
people who provided them with the opportunity to
succeed."
Baseball finally blinked. Larry Silverman, VP and
general counsel for the Pittsburgh Pirates wrote to
PASCA promising to review the information and give it
"proper attention and consideration...once the All-Star
Game has concluded."
This was a real breakthrough for PASCA.
"We aren’t against the Pirates, we are against the
piracy of people’s rights and people’s humanity. When we
put on a [Pirates] shirt we want to know that it’s a
shirt we can wear with dignity because the people who
made the shirt were treated with dignity. [We want] the
Pittsburgh Pirates to be a leader, a league leader, not
in hits, not in home runs, but a league leader for
justice," said Stevens, who represented PASCA in the
negotiations with MLB officials, and chairs the
Pittsburgh-based Black Political Empowerment Project.
While the Pirates didn’t go so far as to sign a pledge
to develop and promote "sweat-free procurement and
licensing standards," the confrontation with PASCA opens
the door for Major League Baseball to follow the lead of
colleges and universities that have agreed to adopt
codes of conduct and independent monitoring of working
conditions in factories producing their apparel. A
Pirates spokeswoman did not respond to requests for
comment.
PASCA member Celeste Taylor is optimistic. "As the light
shines in, the industry isn’t going to be able to stand
up to the pressure."
Anti-sweatshop activists can claim some real progress as
a social movement. Claeson described it as "potentially
a breakthrough in the anti-sweatshop movement" because
the group is shifting its impact from campus to the
major leagues. Some of PASCA’s key members are alums of
the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS)
"These campaigns are going to be successful when we
figure out how to tap into the USAS alumni base [which
is] a group of people with a tremendous shared learning
curve about this issue... It doesn’t take a rocket
scientist to figure out how to win this campaign at this
point," said Kenneth Miller, a founding PASCA member who
was in USAS at Indiana University. "You do the same kind
of bargaining, you do the same kind of creative
organizing, only you’re smarter and you’re older and you
have more resources...We can have a direct and immediate
impact."
Dave Zirin can be reached at dave@edgeofsports.com.
Derek Tyner is a free-lance journalist living in
Washington DC. He can be reached at
derektyner@hotmail.com.