Give Adidas the boot, Student Labor Action Coalition members cried throughout Bascom Hall Wednesday afternoon during the organization's second rally in less than a month protesting the university's deal with the athletic apparel company.
However, UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley announced his plan Wednesday to investigate the mistreatment of workers at a former Adidas factory a little more than an hour before SLAC's protest.
Apparel producer Hermosa Manufacturing of El Salvador allegedly withheld money from its former factory workers against Adidas' requests. The factory was closed in 2005 and workers were dismissed without receiving more than $800,000 in back pay, according to a University Communications release.
Adidas agreed to a code of conduct with the university regarding the treatment of workers, and if the allegations of Hermosa pocketing the workers' wages are true, Adidas could lose the right to produce UW apparel, the release said.
""Bottom line, if there has been a breach of [the code], I intend to do everything necessary to confirm it and to address the problem immediately,"" Wiley said in the release.
To investigate the situation further, Wiley and his assistant LaMarr Billups plan to send Dawn Crim, assistant to the director of community relations in the chancellor's office, to El Salvador April 12.
""Primarily, we want to get a firsthand description of what has happened to these workers directly from the workers,"" Billups said.
University spokesperson John Lucas added that getting an ""unvarnished"" view of the situation is important in Wiley's decision because the information Crim obtains will not be ""filtered through somebody else,"" or other organizations' rumor mills.
Lucas said Hermosa worked with Adidas between 2000 and 2002 and that students and workers have asked Adidas to pay its workers again to make sure the money actually gets to them. However, Adidas is reluctant to do so because the company already paid the workers once, according to Billups.
""We chose Adidas as our sponsor because we believed that they were a leader in the industry, especially in the area of corporate social responsibility,"" Billups said.
He said he was surprised at Adidas' reluctance to reimburse employees because the university has had ""a pretty good relationship"" with the company until this point.
""They've given us unprecedented access to internal documents and information about the factories that are making clothes with our name and logo on it—info that other schools don't get,"" Billups said.
Billups said Wiley plans to meet with the senior executive leadership of Adidas regardless of Crim's findings at the Hermosa factory and later with UW-Madison's Labor Licensing Policy Committee to discuss his views on the issue.
SLAC member Molly Glasgow said SLAC, along with the LLPC, recommended to Wiley earlier this month that UW-Madison should terminate the contract with Adidas.
""The ties need to be cut because of the breach, but really what we care about is that the workers get their money and find jobs,"" she said.
