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. And I think it's important to understand that that wage is not adequate for him to have a middle class lifestyle. He struggles to make ends meet, even though his wife is working. He has two young kids. One of his kids is a little bit younger than one of mine. So we were talking about, you know, he said it's not enough money to maintain his, you know, brands like Nike are profiting handsomely off of the sale of this gear. brands and retailers like the markup on the shirt is about 70%. Meanwhile, workers earn 1% or less of the final cost of the shirt in workers like him. And advocates in this industry, advocates fighting for fair wages, have pointed out that brands and retailers could ensure that workers are being paid fairly. They're profiting handsomely off of it.

Terry Lipshetz: Did you get any feedback from apparel companies?

Hayleigh Colombo: They largely didn't want to talk about this issue. Nike didn't respond to multiple requests for comment, even, about specific issues that had come up in their other brands that we reached out to. Kind of sent back statements, I would say, about, oh, we care about their treatment of worker. And I don't want to say that they don't, but I think that they don't feel a lot of impetus, apparently, to change the situation. And there are a lot of people suffering under this system. Experts that I talked with, who study the global apparel industry have noted that, in order to pay workers a fair living wage for them, it would really not drastically impact the cost of a t shirt. Even if they pass 100% of the cost on to consumers. It would add, like a dollar or something like that. Obviously, you could debate whether consumers should pay the full cost of doing something like that, or brands and retailers should eat into their profit a little bit to cover that. But it wouldn't be a drastic investment that they would have to make in order to write the ship.

Terry Lipshetz: And, there's not really a lot of pressure, it seems, right now, to write that ship.

Hayleigh Colombo: There's been kind of waxing and waning pressure over the last several decades. There was in the early 2000s, when after US. Manufacturing of clothing declined, and more and more clothing started being manufactured overseas in these low wage countries, there was a big outcry about how apparel was being made. I don't know if people remember, like, Kathy Lee Gifford got into a lot of hot water back in the day for her clothing brand. And there have been various disasters have happened. Horrible disasters have happened over the years. In 2013, a Bangladesh building collapsed, it's kind of known as the Rana Plaza disaster. And more than 1000 people died, largely garment workers. And it's the worst disaster that the industry has ever known. So when situations like that happen, yes, there's a large outcry, but by and large, obviously there's really not. Consumers are kind of going about their day, consumers are cash strapped as well. I'm in the same way, I'm not trying to pay as much as possible to buy a t shirt. You try to get the best thing you can for the least amount of money to fit in your budget. And I've talked with folks who have said it really shouldn't be on consumers, it should be on the brands and retailers, as well as the large institutional buyers like universities, or like professional sports teams who put that pressure on the brands and retailers to change their practices.

Terry Lipshetz: The fact that this story is about universities is interesting because obviously division, one level universities are big money makers with football programs and basketball programs, and it's not professional sports, but there's a lot of money in it, like professional sports, and you get crowds of 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 or more going to football games. So it's a huge industry. But at the same time, many of these large schools are also research universities. They study things like labor practices. And it's kind of an interesting situation. So what kind of responsibility do universities bear here?

Hayleigh Colombo: It's so interesting. And one of the reasons why we focused on university gear when this problem exists across all apparel, every time you buy a shirt that insert retailer of your choice, the same issues are at play. The difference with the university apparel is that they are public facing, publicly funded, most of the time, obviously, there's private universities, but publicly funded by taxpayers, institutions of higher learning, where, like you're saying, some of the same institutions that have apparel that's being produced under unfair conditions, those same institutions have professors, there who are studying this issue. Experts have said that, universities do play a big role in trying to correct this. And to their credit, to the extent that anyone has tried to improve this, universities have. And so I talked to university officials too, who are kind of begrudging the fact that people...