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New Era Cap Company responded Monday to allegations of human rights abuses at its plant in Mobile, Ala., in the wake of University of Wisconsin severing its licensing contract with the hat manufacturer.
According to a statement by New Era, the apparel company held a rally at its Derby, N.Y. production facility attended by a crowd of more than 500 employees �to demonstrate that New Era � promotes and pays its people fairly.�
The rally was held just three days after UW canceled its contract with the company.
Dana Marciniak, New Era�s corporate communications manager, said the news of UW�s termination of the contract has come as a surprise. According to Marciniak, New Era has not received word from UW the university was considering dropping the contract.
�They didn�t give us any notification yet,� Marciniak said. �We�re finding out through the media.�
Chancellor John Wiley�s office announced Friday the university was terminating the contract with New Era to the UW Labor Licensing Policy Committee following a presentation by Chynna Haas of the Student Labor Action Coalition.
Haas visited with workers at the Mobile plant earlier this month.
�Their concerns focused on racial discrimination in the workplace and with promotions,� she said.
Haas said the majority of workers are black women who are regularly passed up for promotions in favor of white employees, even if they are more qualified.
�Sometimes they are having to train the white individuals that are promoted because they aren�t qualified,� she added.
According to Haas, most employees at the Mobile plant are making between $8 and $9 per hour, which she says is not enough to support a family in the region.
�You�re making much more money if you walk in as a white employee,� Haas said.
According to Haas, employees in the Mobile plant are forced to work overtime and are subject to an overly strict seven-point system for their attendance that gives employees points for arriving to work late or missing work altogether. Once employees reach seven points, they are fired.
UW sophomore Jan Van Tol, a member of UW Labor Licensing Policy Committee, said UW is exercising the �no cause� clause in the contract, but he said he would prefer if UW claimed a �breach of contract.�
�It would�ve been better if the university had terminated the contract because of human rights abuses,� Van Tol. �As a public university, we should make a moral stand.�
Marciniak said New Era is �not in breach of any contract� and is �absolutely not� engaging in any racist practices.
According to Marciniak, the Mobile plant currently has three black floor supervisors out of eight to twelve total supervisory positions. She added 39 percent of management in all three production facilities is black.
In addition, Marciniak said New Era pays its workers in Mobile a median wage of $10 per hour. The Economic Research Institute, Marciniak added, says the wage is on par with other similar positions in the state.
Marciniak said New Era requested an economic proposal dealing with pay from the local Teamsters union in early January as an effort to work cooperatively with the union. New Era has not received a response, she said.
Addressing the seven-point attendance system, Marciniak said it is a fair system to keep the plant operating efficiently. Employees can talk with management if they have a legitimate reason to get the point erased. She added the point disappears after a month if the employee does not have any other incidents.
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This is very similar to New Era’s response when UW cut its contract 6 years ago over very similar allegations in a New York plant.
I am very suspicious of the “rally” at the Derby plant. In situations like this it is common for management to coerce workers to participate in rallies or other shows of “support” when the company’s reputation is tarnished. It should also be noted that the Derby workers are NOT represented by the Teamsters, so there is some inter-union competition as well. But ultimately, this begs the question, when was the last time you attended a rally supporting your bosses?
The seven-point system could ultimately be fair; after all, disciplinary systems are fairly common. However, in this case, the rules are notoriously arbitrary and racist. All is left to the discretion of supervisors, and can be applied in any manner they see fit because they claim that no real rulebook exists. Thus, a white worker could show up 30 minutes late and drunk, while a black worker could show up 1 minute late, and both could be docked the same number of points.
The treatment of women in the Alabama plant also raises troubling concerns. One woman who was pregnant was told she had to keep working until delivery, with one supervisor even telling her that they would bring out towels if she went into labor on the shop floor. In another incident, a pregnant worker was told she couldn’t transfer to a less-strenuous task during the third trimester, because, as a supervisor told her, a white woman had worked at a desk in the office until the 8th month.
This response from New Era is of course expected, given that losing UW’s contract is a blow both financially and publicly, but it is nothing more than an attempt by their PR to save face. After all, once a school like UW cuts their contract, others are likely to follow. The Teamsters are even talking with Major League Baseball to terminate their exclusive cap contract with New Era. They violated the terms of the contract, plain and simple. Even if the allegations proved to be false, they still refused to allow an independent investigation by the Workers Rights Consortium, as demanded by the contract and the University’s Code of Conduct. This alone was enough grounds to terminate the contract, but the refusal also suggests that their is significant merit to the allegations to warrant a cover-up. In the end the University chose to end the contract quietly, not based on the allegations or breach of contract, but merely that the University no longer wished to be associated with New Era.
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When’s New Era going to make the throwback Wisconsin hat? That’s the real question.