May 5th, 2008

Chancellor Wiley,

You recent response to the grave situation of the Hermosa workers has clearly demonstrated that your professed commitment to labor rights is a charade. Your actions do not in any way support the high-minded rhetoric you enjoy using on public occasions. While you claim to support the cause of worker justice, you nonetheless continue to condone the abuse of workers in our name, thus degrading the reputation of this university.

In 2005, as you know, Hermosa Manufacturing shut down. At the time, its 260 workers were owed roughly $825,000. The 63 workers who were union members at the time protested and pursued legal claims to this money, and as a result, they were blacklisted and labeled as troublemakers. Recent evidence from the Worker Rights Consortium demonstrates without a doubt that, three years later, they remain blacklisted.

At the April 4th meeting of the LLPC, which you attended only long enough to deliver your ten minutes of prepared remarks (but evidently not prepared enough, seeing as you forgot our group's name), Adidas representative Gregg Nebel explicitly admitted that its factories in El Salvador discriminated against these same 63 workers, and just as explicitly stated that adidas would never force its factories to rehire "known unionizers," as any reasonable standard of justice requires.

After Mr. Nebel made this statement, we expected you to be outraged. We certainly were. It is one of the most brazen admissions of guilt by an apparel executive in recent memory, and clearly demonstrates how high this vicious anti-worker attitude extends into the management of an industry that, in your own words, "seems purposefully organized for the most cynical and callous exploitation of third-world labor."

As justification for continuing to contract with adidas, you have repeatedly cited "unfettered access to their books" and executives as a primary reason. You state that "it is better to be at the table rather than on the outside looking in" and that "adidas has been responsive and continues to be responsive to our concerns." In our April 9 letter to you, we posed the question, which you did not answer, what, exactly, has been the result of this "engagement" with Adidas?

Of the $825,000 owed to workers, how much has been paid? (Less than 5%, which was given as a strictly humanitarian gesture.) Of the 63 blacklisted workers, how many of them are employed? (Zero.) On January 15, 2008, 21 former Hermosa workers applied for work at the nearby Chi Fung factory. Of these, only six were even allowed in the doors to apply. Of the six, only one was hired. She was then fired on her first day of work at 11:30 am, after mere hours of work. It is also important to note that adidas pulled production from Chi Fung mere weeks before this scheduled hiring exercise, undermining the hiring process which adidas itself, working through the Fair Labor Association, had instituted. These facts, as you must agree, are the proper metric by which to measure the efficacy of adidas' efforts - not some vague "access to their books."

As you know, blacklisting is one of the most effective tools apparel brands have to keep labor standards low and factory operations cheap. For the past ten years, we have fought ceaselessly against this sort of anti-worker discrimination, and yet now you seem happy to throw all our work away based on the delusion that our "engagement" with adidas is somehow yielding results. If any such results do exist, they must be hiding in your locked office, or else surely someone would have spotted them.

The case of Hermosa aside, your refusal to meet with students reflects extremely poorly on your performance as Chancellor of a public university. Furthermore, your office has largely refused to release any relevant information to students, offering instead vague platitudes signifying nothing. At the April 18 meeting of the LLPC, your assistant Dawn Crim reported that she had "nothing to report" on Hermosa, and she refuses as a matter of course to elaborate or share necessary information with students. Questions directed to her regarding your plans for remediation of Hermosa were angrily deflected or ignored.

Throughout this case, the only clear message you have sent to students is that our views are unworthy of your attention. We have offered you numerous opportunities to engage in dialogue on this issue; you have refused. The content of your letters echos the very same talking points you used more than a year ago. This shameful excuse for a process has dragged on for far too many years, and it is utterly disgraceful that you still refuse to act. We therefore reiterate our demand that you terminate the Adidas contract immediately before you besmirch the proud name of this university any further.

- THE STUDENT LABOR ACTION COALITION