Consortium Targets New Era In Latest Pro-Labor Effort

The Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) "for the first time ... is training its sights on an American factory," as it has recently issued a report "accusing the New Era Cap Company of having an extraordinarily high injury rate" at its factory in Derby, NY, according to Steven Greenhouse of the N.Y. TIMES, who notes about 300 workers at the plant are on strike. The WRC report also "accuses New Era of seeking to punish the workers by cutting their wages and transferring production" to "lower-wage, nonunion plants in Alabama," because the workers had voted to "join an aggressive new union." Greenhouse: "New Era cannot easily ignore the consortium, or the many protests by campus anti-sweatshop groups, because the company has licenses to make baseball caps for 98 colleges, many of them requiring licensees to follow a code of conduct that protects worker safety and the right to form unions." New Era is also an MLB licensee. Union President Jane Howald said, "These efforts by the students and colleges will help us tremendously. We're up here in Derby, N.Y., and who's heard of us? The students and colleges are letting everybody know what's happening in this little factory." Meanwhile, New Era Chair David Koch "denied any retaliation" in the company's move to shift labor to AL, saying that the "cost of producing a hat averaged $2.80 at Derby, compared with $1.10" in AL. Greenhouse reports the "main cause of the strike was the workers' overwhelming rejection of management's proposal to reduce wages for most workers unless they significantly speed up production. Union leaders, pointing to the unusually high rate of repetitive-stress injuries, said speeding up production would have only aggravated the injury rate" (N.Y. TIMES, 8/21).