Besides heightening awareness about sweatshops and child labor in general, Trina and I were gaining supporters for the Norfolk sweatfree campaign. The Friday preceding the festival, December 4th, Trina and I met with the Sacred Heart Catholic Church globalization community, a local Norfolk region faith based group interested in learning more about the social justice issues that sweatshops raise and more importantly, what concrete actions they could take as individuals and a community to both raise awareness and effect change. We expected to be addressing a group that knew little about the global problems that lead to the use of Sweatshop labor but instead what we found was a well informed group of highly active individuals. Members of the globalization community were active in immigrants’ rights issues, affordable housing projects, as well as global outreach, specifically to sister communities in Haiti. Groups such as the Virginia Organizing Project and the more local Tidewater Sowers of Justice were represented as well. It was obvious this group was interested in how to run an effective campaign and how to effect real change in Norfolk and the surrounding area.
Trina explained to the group the basic supply chain model, explaining how one item of clothing will actually touch, on average, 23 hands before you buy it from your local retail store. She also explained how governments on all levels, local to national, have contracts with suppliers of everything from police uniforms to computers, that are used to supply services to the public. It is at this level that real change can be made, the goal being to pass a policy stipulating that the city/county/state will no longer buy products from companies that use sweatshop labor. Back at the festival we encouraged shoppers to sign postcards, supporting a local sweatfree campaign, which would be mailed to the Mayor of Norfolk. They stated, “I don’t want my tax dollars to support sweatshops,” and “I urge you to join the new State and Local Government Sweatfree Consortium.” When explaining the postcards to interested individuals, many people were very surprised to hear that governments buy from companies using sweatshop labor and enthusiastically signed the cards, sometimes asking if they could get involved in the local effort.
The end result of the ILRF’s involvement in the festival was an increased understanding of what Fair Trade really means and implies and how it is linked not only to the rights of small farmers but to labor rights more generally. This festival has taken place for eight years in a row now and hopefully our presence this year will encourage, what seems to be an interested population, to take action and help the Virginia Sweatfree movement to continue to grow and spread.
If you’d like to have ILRF visit your place of worship, school, or community group, send an email to trina.tocco [at] ilrf.org to make arrangements.
To read more about the festival, check out these local newspapers’ websites:
