Take a peek at your shirt’s tag. Go ahead, it’s OK to put the paper down for a second and look. So, what’s the verdict? Honduras? China?

Or perhaps Bangladesh?

Fear not, a movement is building on campus. The first read of a GSB resolution will be this coming Wednesday, led by our campus Amnesty International chapter. The resolution will ask for Iowa State to join the University of Iowa and 118 other universities as an affiliate of the Worker’s Rights Consortium (WRC).

The WRC charges a 1 percent fee of our total profits from licensed apparel (in our case, $5,000) to work in cooperation with the university and manufacturers to ensure our gear is sweatshop free. They act as an oversight committee, not as bully, knowing full well that working with manufacturers is often better than demonizing them.

We’ve all heard about sweatshop labor practices the world over. Millions of people work in factories where they are not paid a living wage and work without sufficient benefits. It doesn’t take an intimate knowledge of the situation to know that the prison-like conditions, pregnancy testing and inhumane hours of these factories in export processing zones needs to stop. According to Oxfam Canada, an estimated 23 million people work in the garment industry worldwide, and many of them toil under brutal conditions. I could rant on, but you I think you get the picture.

It does not have to be this way. In places around the country, people are delivering steady change, through the WRC and universities as well as on their own.

The gleaming poster child of profit and social responsibility is American Apparel in Los Angeles (americanapparel.net). Only five years old, the company is growing faster than ever. In the past three years, they’ve doubled their sales every year from $20 million in 2001 to an estimated $75 million in 2003, according to Industry Week magazine. They’ve been the subjects of sparkling media attention from everyone from The New York Times to Seventeen to Glamour. They are now one of the largest T-shirt manufacturers nationwide with the largest sewn products factory in the United States.

The “senior partner” (not called a CEO) of the company, Dov Charney, has charmed many interviewers with his wit and fierce defense of profitable and socially responsible business.

He told Industry Week last month, “Our prices are higher than some of the off-shore producers, and rightly so. But ask a 20-year-old young woman if it makes a difference to her, $12 or $18, which T-shirt she wants to wear. If the $12 T-shirt is not fitting right, she won’t wear it in public. In fact it has a negative value. Not [everybody] wants to be low-costed.”

He has a laundry list of socially responsible practices, including affordable health care for employees and their families, immigration support, free English and computer classes, subsidized lunches and bus passes well as good wages, according to the company’s Web site. His more than 1500 workers average more than $12.15 an hour. So far, the experiment has been working.

If American Apparel is the sexy, glamorous end of the spectrum, a host of other companies and groups fill in the rest. Through the Clean Clothes Connection (clean clothesconnection.org), I found dozens of retailers and manufacturers offering everything from sweatshop-free to union-made to organic cotton T-shirts.

The Toronto City Council has unanimously approved a resolution that all uniforms and apparel worn by city employees must be bought from approved sweatshop free vendors. Across the U.S., similar resolutions on college campuses and city councils are having an impact.

Religious communities are part of the effort as well. The Presbyterian Church (USA) has a Sweat Free T organization, where T-shirts are made in a worker-owned garment cooperative in Nicaragua and sold through the Web site. Their shirts are a mere $2.75 each and $4.75 for the organic cotton version.

Student organizations here on campus already order sweatshop free T-shirts from distributors at a competitive cost like No Sweat Apparel (nosweatapparel.com). Even small bulk orders run about five dollars per shirt.

These plain T-shirts can be ordered in a variety of sizes and colors, and printed locally.

Iowa State can soon take a stand, along with many other institutions, as a community concerned about working conditions at home and in developing countries.

We are beginning to realize that our lives are intertwined with those who produce our clothing and that their rights must be protected.