Cornell Students Against Sweatshops and the Cornell Organization for Labor Action are petitioning Ithaca's Common Council to join a coalition of municipalities across the country that have pledged to ensure that public tax dollars are not being spent to support factories that exploit and endanger workers.
"It's about transparency," said Andrew Wolf, president of Cornell Students Against Sweatshops. "It's about taxpayers being able to know where their money's getting spent and making sure that it's not supporting practices that are essentially illegal - in our country they're illegal."
Some of those practices include child labor, requiring 12-hour days six to seven days a week with no overtime pay, and requiring female employees to submit to pregnancy tests and firing them if they are found to be pregnant, Wolf said.
More than 180 municipalities across the country have signed onto the Local and Government Sweat-free Consortium, an organization designed to pool municipal purchasing power in order to hire factory inspectors and ensure that tax dollars are not going to sweatshops.
The state governments of Vermont, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California and Illinois have all signed on, and New York state is very close, Wolf said.
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