When garment worker Sonia Beatriz Lara toured Ann Arbor yesterday, she was familiar with Michigan's maize and blue - she had seen it before, in the factory where she used to work in El Salvador.
"The factory I worked at made T-shirts for the university you study at," she said, through an interpreter at an informational forum hosted by Students Organizing for Labor and Economic Equality.
More than 75 people filled Room 100 of Hutchins Hall to hear Lara and fellow garment worker Eva Nerio Ponce speak about labor conditions at factories where they once worked.
The workers are touring college campuses across the nation with Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the National Labor Committee.
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| DANNY KALICK/Daily United Students Against Sweatshops organizer Eric Brakken holds up a Nike advertisement regarding its factory locations that appeared in college newspapers nationwide two weeks ago. |
Lara, a single mother caring for a 5-year old daughter, told the audience about the long hours she worked at in a factory producing skirts, jackets, blouses and pants for Liz Claiborne, DKNY and Perry Ellis, among other companies.
"We went into work at 6:50 in the morning ... and we wouldn't usually get out until 7 at night," she said.
After she and others spoke to Columbia University graduate students researching sweatshop labor wages, she said she was fired March 19.
"Our friends told us that our boss told them they fired us because we had talked to the gringos," Lara said.
Ponce told a similar story to the audience. The mother of a 4-year-old daughter, said she made shirts, skirts and other garments for companies including Fruit of the Loom and K-Mart.
Holding up a T-shirt, she explained to the audience how she used to made similar garments. She estimated that she got paid an equivalent of $.03 per T-shirt in the factory where she worked.
Kernaghan explained that a similar garment for Yale University would have a retail price of $14.99, about two-tenths of 1 percent of what they are paid.
In the end, Ponce said she just wanted to thank University students and other student activists across the nation for their work to help end sweatshop labor.
"On behalf of all of all of my compañeras, I thank you," she said.
Kernaghan said students need to be aware about where their clothing is produced.
"There is something wrong here. You are here at a tremendous university, in a beautiful city, getting a great education - there is something
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