Universities, apparel companies make millions from clothing made for poverty wages

Welcome to another episode of Behind the Headlines, where we feature experts and journalists discussing a variety of topics. In this latest episode, Hayleigh Colombo, a reporter for Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team, talks about her story on logo apparel for colleges and the labor that is being used to produce the clothing.

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Broken threads: College clothing made in factories rife with labor violations, poverty wages

About this program

Host Terry Lipshetz is a senior producer for Lee Enterprises. Besides producing interviews for this Behind the Headlines program, he produces the daily Hot off the Wire news podcast, co-hosts Streamed & Screened movies and television program and is the producer of Across the Sky weather and climate podcast.

Lee Enterprises produces many national, regional and sports podcasts. Learn more here.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Terry Lipshetz: Welcome to another episode of behind the Headlines, where we feature experts and journalists discussing a variety of topics. I'm Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer for Lee Enterprises and your host in this latest episode, Haley Colombo, reporter for Lee Enterprise's public service journalism team, talks about her story on logo apparel for colleges and the labor that is being used to produce the clothing. Haley, welcome to the program.

Hayleigh Colombo: Thanks so much for having me.

Terry Lipshetz: Hayleigh, can you provide just an overall synopsis of what this story is about? Because it felt like there was a lot of pieces in it.

Hayleigh Colombo: I think it's important for people to know when they go to the university bookstore on football Saturday and they're buying a new T shirt or whatever to represent their favorite team, I think we make a lot of those buying decisions and don't necessarily think about what all went into it. What all went into making that shirt that is now on, the rack at my favorite university and being sold for $30 or whatever. $25. And what all went into it is this incredibly it takes an incredibly complex global labor supply chain to make those clothes, to bring them to consumers. And the reality is that the people who had the hardest job in making that shirt were compensated leap. And often those workers are getting poverty level wages that are hard for them to subsist on in their home countries making the US equivalent of a dollar 2 /hour which is even in countries where it costs less. To live or the expenses are less. It's still not enough for them to have a good life, to have the even calories that they need to subsist on. And there's lots of abuses that take place in these apparel factories, whether it's people not having the right to form a union or, when they try to form a union being retaliative against for that, sexual harassment, wage theft. And our universities, which are some of our most well known brands and most important institutions in this country, they themselves are, profiting off of this system because they earn millions of dollars of royalties from the sale of this gear. So we wanted to kind of delve into the conditions that this year is being made under and delve into what, if anything, universities have done, are doing to ensure that the people who actually make the garments with their logos on it are being treated fairly.

Terry Lipshetz: You had an interesting anecdote early in the story about a factory worker from Honduras. Can you talk a little bit about that example that you used about the working conditions and his wages?

Hayleigh Colombo: Yeah, absolutely. So I spoke with famous demas Michael Cardona Bar, and he is a worker in a factory that makes Nike gear. so he had recently worked on a University of Arizona alumni t shirt that Nike is selling for or that the university bookstores or retailers are selling for $35. He has to make upwards of works on upwards of, like, 750 to 1000 of those shirts a day, and he makes the equivalent of $97 a week. essentially that shirt, college football fans who are buying that shirt are paying more for it than he makes in a single day. A