Last semester United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) severed WSU’s ties with Adidas due to the company’s unethical treatment of workers.

The group delivered a letter to President Elson S. Floyd in the spring, which prompted him to support the decision to cut relations with the company. This fall the USAS hopes Floyd will have a similar response when the group presents him next week with another letter addressing the treatment of sweatshop workers sometime.

Garrett Strain, a national organizer for USAS visited WSU last year on a national tour with former Adidas factory workers. The workers shared their stories of mistreatment in Indonesian factories, and then Strain asked students to act.

After the success of the letter last semester, he came back to WSU to help interested students form their own branch of USAS.

“I hope the group will become institutional in advocating the rights for workers nationally and internationally,” Strain said.

Austin Jasienski, a senior and natural resource science major, is also helping lead the new USAS group on campus. He said a large university like WSU can have a substantial influence on the issue of human rights.

“WSU is a Pac-12 school, so we have a lot of impact on schools around the nation,” Jasienski said.

Strain believes student’s at large universities have a unique opportunity to make changes with working conditions overseas.

“Students have enormous powers with their relationships with brands to improve conditions,” he said.

Brittany Beaudry, a junior and double major in psychology and women’s studies, was involved in the delivery of the letter last semester, and is now part of the formation of the USAS group at WSU.

The group’s first goal this semester is to ask Floyd to approach the brands that WSU has contracted with and encourage them to sign an agreement improving the safety of workers in Bangladesh, Beaudry said.

She explained that this last spring a factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 1,000 people. 

“We want President Floyd to ask the apparel companies to sign the accord on fire and building safety in Bangladesh, or say that we’ll terminate our contracts with them,” Beaudry said. “We’re going to try to do it in a professional way—we want him to be in agreement with us.”

Jasienski said she hopes the group on campus and support for the cause will continue to grow.

“If you look around The Bookie, everything is Nike, JanSport and Columbia, and they all have huge factories around the world,” Jasienski said. “WSU should be involved in promoting human rights, and if we all come together we can make a huge difference.”