In China, Harvard’s Apparel Proves Elusive

SHANGHAI, China—There is no factory at 89 Yanping Road. In fact, there is no building with that address at all.

But there should be, according to the Fair Labor Association (FLA), a non-profit organization that monitors the labor conditions of factories that produce goods for more than 170 colleges and universities, including Harvard.

The FLA website gives the 89 Yanping Road address as the location of Shanghai Goldluck Necktie Co., Ltd., a factory that supplies ties to Global Neckwear Marketing of Dorchester, Mass., which in turns sells them to Harvard.

But the website is wrong.

Down the road, on the fourth floor of a building at 69 Yanping, is the headquarters of Shanghai Goldluck Necktie. But the company factories, where workers fashion ties that will travel thousands of miles before they are shelved at the Harvard Square Coop, are not in the city of Shanghai.

One is in Jiangsu province to the north and the other is in Zhejiang province to the south. It takes several hours by car to reach either factory from the dusty street in Shanghai where the FLA believed the ties are made.

Shanghai Goldluck Necktie is one of three Shanghai factories of companies licensed to manufacture products for Harvard that The Crimson attempted to visit by traveling to the addresses listed on a public database at the FLA website. Companies that do not submit factory information to that database are not allowed to affiliate with the FLA—and therefore cannot remain as Harvard licensees.

“Factory disclosure is a major component of a licensee’s affiliation with the FLA,” says Andrew L. Nelson, FLA University Program Associate. “The licensee is required to submit to us the address of all of the facilities where their collegiately licensed goods are produced.”

But a seven-story building covered with white tiles at 669 Chuan Sha Road suggests that FLA regulations aren’t always followed. In the Pudong industrial district of Shanghai, off a pot-holed street glistening in the 90 degree heat, rises Shanghai C&F Arts & Crafts, Inc—the sole factory of Harvard licensee C&F Enterprises of Newport News, VA, according to the FLA.

Two security guards are posted at the gate into the fenced-in facility. A room on the second floor contains a bedspread and pillows neatly laid out for a photo shoot, but conspicuously lacking are the hum of factory machines and the presence of workers.

“There’s no factory here,” explains Chung Lan-Seng, the building manager. “This is an office. We process orders here.”

Although at first Chung, a middle-aged woman originally from Taiwan, refuses to say where the factories are located, she eventually reveals that there are several company factories located in both Shandong and Zhejiang provinces.

But Chung refuses to provide more specific information about the factory names or locations and also declines to comment on working conditions in the factories.

“It’s a trade secret,” she says.

Michelle Taylor, a spokesperson for C&F Enterprises, confirms that the company has produced handcrafted quilted throws, needlepoint pillows and needlepoint stockings for Harvard, but said the company would have no comment on its factories.

Asian Sourcing, the third Shanghai factory The Crimson attempted to visit, is a factory for The Game LLC of Phoenix City, AL. According to the FLA database, the factory is located at 1188 Li An Road.

But local city officials have never heard of the company. And according to local police, cab drivers and a city map, there is no Li An Road in the postal code area that the FLA website lists as the site of Asia Sourcing.

Keeping Tabs?

The difficulty of non-FLA observers in locating—never mind receiving permission to visit—factories that produce Harvard products underlines the challenge facing United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), whose members are gathering at a national anti-sweatshop conference for students at Tufts University this weekend.

“That only confirmed what the entire activist world has already decried, which is that the FLA is a sham organization,” says Madeleine S. Elfenbein ’04, a USAS conference organizer.

“They are an elaborate, corporate cover-up,” she says, noting that Nike—a corporation that has been a major target of anti-sweatshop activism—was a founding member of the FLA.

“The only investigations in which the FLA has made any improvements are those done on the coattails of the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC)—initiated by the WRC and first publicized by the WRC,” says Matthew L. Teaman, a USAS representative and Ohio State University student who serves on the WRC governing board.

Members of Harvard Students Against Sweatshops met with University officials last fall to press them to join the WRC, a non-profit monitoring agency founded by unions, non-governmental organizations and universities to prevent overseas sweatshop labor.

But despite the apparent inaccuracies in FLA records, Harvard officials remain confident in the FLA, which Harvard continues to use, instead of the WRC, to monitor factories that produce its merchandise.

“At this point in time, I’d have to say I’m not concerned because the process is so new,” says Kevin P. Scully, a Harvard trademark licensing and operations administrator. “I have every confidence in the people involved with these issues at the FLA.”

Although independent observers have yet to visit a factory that produces Harvard apparel, Wu Hongjun, a manager at Shanghai Goldluck Necktie, was willing to describe general conditions in factories.

Production of the ties begins at a factory in Zhejiang, according to Wu, and is completed in Jiangsu Province. The workers are mostly women between the ages of 20 and 50 who work from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., though sometimes they are asked to stay until 8 p.m. There are about 120 workers at each factory, he says, who make “about several hundred Harvard ties every year.”

The workers earn about 1,000 RMB, or $122, a month, according to Wu. He says there are no children working in the factory but is not sure if there is a union.

When asked why the Shanghai Goldluck Necktie Company does not manufacture any ties in Shanghai, Wu, sitting in a conference room next to a faux Greek bust wearing a novelty necktie in the shape of corn cob, says the answer is simple.

“It’s would cost too much money,” he says.

—Stephanie M. Skier contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Amit R. Paley can be reached at paley@fas.harvard.edu.