Our sister group got this email from Paul Rice, CEO and founder of Transfair USA yesterday.

paul@transfairusa.org

Often times the corrupt system preys on those that are ignorant of their rights. It’s extremely important for activists to be aware of all their civil rights. One important law that UH SAS has learned is the Texas law on taping phone calls and other forms of electronic communication. Texas is known as a one party consent state. That means only one party has to give their consent to tape a conversation.

For example, if you were being harassed by a bill collector and thought that the speech veered into a criminal violation you could tape the conversation without asking bill collector’s permission. See this website for more information on the specific law in Texas: summary of Texas laws on one party consent.

Probably the most important right for activists is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution which is also known as freedom of expression. Freedom of expression consists of the rights to freedom of speech, press, assembly and to petition the government for a redress of grievances, and the implied rights of association and belief.

The First Amendment protects the freedom to speak your mind and protest in peace without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans cannot be silenced by the government.

The University of Texas, the flagship school in our state even has an explicit policy recognizing this important right:

“First Amendment Rights

In general, expressions of opinion by members of the university community that do not otherwise violate state and federal laws or university rules are protected as “free speech.” This is true even though the opinions expressed may be unpopular or offensive to some. With a population of 71,000, UT Austin encompasses a wide array of opinions and views. We encourage all those associated with the university to exercise their constitutional rights and freedoms responsibly. We do not, however, punish people who express views that may be unpopular or offensive, but who break no laws or university rules while doing so.”

Recently a lawyer with the Texas Attorney General’s office filed an extremely useless motion in a lawsuit that our member Tim filed for some shenanigans around his graduate education. We thought it would be instructive to post it to see how unfamiliar this silly lawyer is with the First Amendment… read and enjoy, very little of what is written in the motion is actually factual or based on any law, but that does not stop this silly man. It’s important to keep in mind the fact that this guy has to work for the public is because he couldn’t get a job at a big firm. Since he has very few legal skills (he has not been able to get Tim’s federal lawsuit against our University [now a year old] dismissed either) he has to spend his time imagining the First Amendment does not exist and wasting the taxpayers time and money by filing frivolous motions like this.

Here’s the silly motion: Motion for Sanctions

Jose Rangel is the Associate Vice Chancellor / Vice President for Legal Affairs and Deputy General Counsel at our University. Rangel also  graduated from the University of Houston in 1975. Unfortunately for anyone who wants make the University of Houston a better place, particularly a place that values the contributions of all staff and contract workers on our campus, Mr. Rangel is not very helpful. In fact Mr. Rangel actively works against students like us who volunteer their time to work in solidarity with workers who supply our University with logo clothes, serve us food, or clean our classrooms.

We don’t mean to single out Mr. Rangel for his personal liability in furthering the oppressive conditions that our University engages in on a daily basis. It’s just that Mr. Rangel has been particularly unprofessional in his dealings with students advocating for workers rights. The post below has three video tapes that demonstrate Mr. Rangel’s thoroughly unprofessional behavior.

We thought it would be helpful to point out the huge gap in pay between Mr. Rangel and a UH custodian. Currently, the University pays custodians as little $6.56 an hour! You find that data right on the Houston Chronicle webpage where they are advertising for a UH custodian position: custodian opening UH On the other hand, Mr. Rangel pulls down a yearly salary of $177,699 which at 52 weeks a year and 40 hours a week works out to $85.43 an hour.

We’re not saying that Mr. Rangel is a selfish individual only concerned with himself, because we never engage in personal attacks. However we think that there is a possibility that Mr. Rangel has a hard time empathizing with the custodians and food service workers on our campus, many whom make minimum wage.

If you think that Mr. Rangel should behave a little better, then by all means call him or email him. His phone number is : (713) 743-0949 and his email address is: jmrangel@uh.edu

Remember, if you pay taxes, Mr. Rangel works for you!

This afternoon three of our members had a few quick errands to run on campus. We had to do some banking, we needed to add our fall meeting time to our banner, and then we had to go by the university general counsel’s office to set up a time to view some documents per a request that our member Brendan Laws made. We also had to pay $40 for another public information request. The Texas Public Information Act is really useful because it allows citizens a way to look at documents created by the government. Click here for a quick primer: Texas public info.

Anyway it was just another routine day on campus for a few activists. However as is often the case at the University of Houston, where they make up new laws everyday, the most mundane task can turn into an ugly incident of oppression of happy go lucky students.

It was about 1:45 when we walked toward the lawyers office. We came upon Leslie Pruski, (secretary to Dona Cornell, the general counsel) in the hallway. She asked who we were here to see and we told her Valerie Coleman-Ferguson, one of the lawyers on staff. Pruski went into the office and told someone.  A woman came out and we told her the same thing. She told us to wait, which we did. We sat for around 15 minutes. Now bear in mind all we had to do was give them $40 cash and get a receipt and go. Another woman passed through the reception area we were waiting in and we asked her to check on things. She returned and told us they were checking on the law and would get back to us. They had to check on the law to see if they could accept cash? But wait it gets better. Then still another woman came out and showed our member Tim a receipt and took his $40, but instead of letting us have the receipt she said she had to take it and photocopy our money and our receipt.

So we waited another ten or fifteen minutes. Except now Brendan was going to be late for work because it was 2:30 so we went ahead and went into the hallway where the offices are and the video above shows what happened.

It’s important to note the the lawyer in this video, Mr. Rangel, is not just having a bad day, he has a bad day everyday students are around on legitimate business. For review and contextual purposes, below are two more videos showing Mr. Rangel acting unprofessional and ignorant. We think this accurately reflects most UH staffer’s attitudes towards students or at least the ones that we’ve encountered over the years of our activism.

Its also important to note that our group is primarily made up of working class students. We mention that because we had to buy this expensive video camera and we must continually buy tapes for it just to protect ourselves. Its bad enough that they jack up the tuition every year, but it is just ridiculous that we can’t do the simplest errand on campus without having these folks go beserk on us. This idiotic behavior of staffers just makes us use up more film and more time documenting it.

And here’s another one from this year:

Emily Messa, assistant vice president for university services has been involved in a major greenwashing campaign at the University of Houston for some time now. First let’s define the terms. Merriam Webster dictionary defines greenwashing as “expressions of environmentalist concerns especially as a cover for products, policies, or activities.” Remember that Ms. Messa and the University of Houston’s main reason for existence is to ensure profits for corporations.

UH Students Against Sweatshops has been working for two long years on our campus to bring ethical garments to our school. Recently, as our previous post (see below) details, Knights Apparel released a letter to the affiliates of the Worker Rights Consortium. The letter contains details about a project Knights is working on to manufacture collegiate logo apparel in a socially responsible way. We got our school to affiliate with the WRC back in November 2008.

We requested a short meeting with Ms. Messa to discuss how UH could take part in this unprecedented opportunity. For example, Duke university made a commitment to purchase $250,000 worth of apparel from Knights Apparel to show their support for socially responsible garments. See: Duke to buy $250,000 in sweat free apparel

Instead of taking thirty minutes to meet concerned students, on June 5, 2009 Ms. Messa had her office issue a press release  that is full of inaccuracies. Here’s the press release: Apparel (click link and you come to another page, then click link again) For example, the press release claims that “… by associating  with the WRC the UH bookstore…”  Now we’re to believe that the UH Bookstore (run by Barnes and Nobles) is a member of the Worker Rights Consortium! Actually only universities and schools can be affiliates of the WRC, see the list of affiliates on their website.

When we went to Ms. Messa’s office on Monday June 8, she refused to come out and speak with us. So as you see, UH is all about trying to make corporations look good, not about actually doing anything themselves like top tier school Duke did by making a quarter million dollar commitment to purchase the sweat free clothes. No, Messa and the rest of the corporate flunkies who run UH are only interested in getting money for their corporate masters.

Click the link to see the video of our appointment request:

Unfortunately for Ms. Messa and other immoral UH administrators of her ilk, we never stop fighting for social justice. In fact we and / or our allies make house calls. Last Saturday June 6 Students for Fair Trade stopped by Ms. Messa’s house on similar social justice causes to ours. See the Students for Fair Trade website for details on that house protest: SFT Messa house protest

Here’s one of several videos of the Students for Fair Trade in action at Emily Messa’s house:

The Knights Apparel company has been working for several years to provide a sweat free alternative to all the licensed collegiate apparel that is sold in college bookstores and other retailers across the country.

In a memo to all Worker Rights Consortium (WRC)  members Scott Nova, WRC director wrote:

“Overall, we are very happy with the progress that has been made to date. To cite a key example of this progress, Barnes & Noble College Booksellers has committed to selling the Knights Apparel product in roughly 350 of their stores and they have made a strong commitment to launch a robust and multi-faceted marketing campaign to spread awareness of the initiative. This is obviously a very significant development: there is widespread agreement that achieving a higher level of respect for workers’ rights in the apparel industry requires greater participation on the part of large retailers. For a major retailer like Barnes & Noble to lend its enthusiastic support to this initiative is very heartening and we commend the company’s leadership…

Meanwhile, discussions on the ground in the Dominican Republic with the manufacturer, and with worker representatives and local civil society groups, are continuing. These discussions, which focus on the labor rights compliance and verification process, have gone very well. This work is being coordinated on the ground by the WRC’s staff person in Santo Domingo.”

UH SAS’  liaison with the WRC, Theresa Haas, informs us that the plan is to have the sweat free clothes in Barnes and Nobles bookstores as soon as the factory gets up and running. The University of Houston bookstore is run by Barnes and Nobles so we’re hoping to see a sweat free alternative on our campus soon.

If you click on the link below you can see the details in a 3 page memo from Joe Bozich, the CEO of Knights Apparel to all the universities (including U of Houston!) affiliated with the WRC.

Knights Apparel Memo to WRC Affiliate Universities and Colleges 05-01-09

On Tuesday, April 21 four Students Against Sweatshops members went to a “town hall” meeting that UH president Renu Khator was presiding over. As usual Khator’s thuglike security just couldn’t handle students wanting to exercise their first amendment rights. Here’s what happened:

The awesome folks at Sweatfree Communities released a follow up to their report “Subsidizing Sweatshops” which was all about state governments contracting with companies that use sweatshops to make their uniforms and other kinds of apparel.

The sixty-one page report is available on their website: Sweatfree Communities 4.15.09 report

Most readers wouldn’t be surprised to know that Sweatfree Communities researchers found out:

April 15, 2009– Subsidizing Sweatshops II, a new report released today by SweatFree Communities, documents severe violations of labor law and human rights in nearly all factories investigated, including:

• Child labor (14 and 15 year olds work in two factories investigated)
• Poverty wages (only enough to cover 1/4-1/2 of a family’s basic needs)
• Excessive production quotas (resulting in 12 hour days, coming to work sick, and limits on bathroom usage)
• Mandatory pregnancy tests (in two factories, as a requirement of employment)
• Unhealthy work environment (suffocating heat; dust causing chronic respiratory problems; accidents resulting in puncture wounds and losing fingers)
• Severe repression of union supporters (harassment, intimidation, firings and, in at least one case, blacklisting)

Honduran Factory Workers Will Tour West Coast Schools April 13-28, Seeking Russell Contract Cuts

United Students Against Sweatshops is thrilled to announce the second tour in the U.S. by workers of Russell’s Jerzees de Honduras factory. During April 13-28, two workers — representing the 1800 workers that Russell left jobless simply for forming a union — will travel to the West Coast to call on universities to join the growing number of schools (over two dozen) severing ties with Russell Athletic. Campuses include:

• University of Arizona
• University of San Diego
• UC Irvine
• University of Southern California
• UCLA

The best way to keep tabs on United Students Against Sweatshops campaign to re-open the Jerzees de Honduras factory that Russell closed because the workers were union (see: WRC report on Russell\’s worker\’s rights violations)

is to surf over to the Rein in Russell blog

We filed a lawsuit against the “Apparel Task Force” on April 1, 2009. Since we are not a corporation or a non-profit charity group, just an officially registered UH student group, we had to put file the suit in one of our members names.  The suit is captioned O’Brien v. Alderman, 2009 – 20328, and its in the 280th Judicial District Court in Harris County.

This morning we handed out 300 flyers at the People’s Law school, which is a program that Richard Alderman, on of the five faculty on the Task Force, has run for quite a while to pump up a populist image of himself. Earlier blog posts can describe what happened the last time we passed out flyers back in October, 2008.

Here’s the text from our flyer that hopefully recounts the whole story. Feel free to email or call us with any questions (contact info on our “About” page).

BE CAREFUL ABOUT TAKING
LEGAL ADVICE FROM
“THE PEOPLE’S LAWYER”

WHY? STUDENTS ARE SUING HIM!

Here’s the skinny: In the spring of 2008 the U of Houston “shared governance” system which is the faculty, student and staff governing bodies decided unanimously to affiliate with the Worker’s Rights Consortium. The WRC is an independent third party labor monitoring organization that almost 200 top universities belong to. The shared governance system also agreed to sign on to the Designated Supplier Program. The  DSP  is a proposal by the WRC and the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS)  to address working conditions in the apparel industry for the workers who sew collegiate apparel.

Well, UH President Dr. Renu Khator actually couldn’t wait until the shared governance ran its course, shortly after the student government signed off on the WRC and the DSP she appointed 5 unqualified (in that they never published on any relevant topic, labor, globalization, marketing, social responsibility, etc.) faculty + 1 staffer and 1 student and called it the “Apparel Task Force.” So in April 2008 the task force invites us, the UH Students Against Sweatshops to give a presentation about the issue and we videotaped it. Then in July, 2008 the Apparel Task Force released their final “report” (actually more of a press release since the 5 faculty did not show any scholarship, not even one footnote) claims that we, the students said we said our presentation (and that we already pushed through student government and by this time both the faculty and staff agreed) that there would “…Likely will be little impact from joining WRC or the DSP.” Even though we’ve been pushing the DSP and the WRC for more than two years, and have tons of paperwork from 2 prior UH presidents to prove it, and in this case VIDEOTAPE OF THE ENTIRE PRESENTATION, the People’s Lawyer and his cronies had to throw a big fat lie in their no scholarship “report.” Now of course as you might expect Dr. Khator is ignoring the shared governance and won’t sign the DSP (although we did force her to get UH to affiliate with the Worker’s Rights Consortium, making us the first in Texas to do so. Yea! – power to the people!)

Of course that’s a ludicrous lie about our campaign and Richard Alderman, the people’s lawyer, drafted most of the final report, probably because he was the only LAWYER on the task force and since he’s the “People’s Lawyer” he should “know his rights” and know that he can be held accountable in a court of law. (we did public info requests to get all the emails between task force members, that’s how we know Alderman did the dirty work). Anyway we asked the Apparel Task Force chair Steven Craig (an economics prof) in writing about 3 or 4 times to remove the false statements about us and he refused. About ten days ago we even met with Mr. People’s Lawyer and instead of removing the false statement, the Richard Alderman offered us a bribe: Here’s the email he sent us:

From: Alderman, Richard M <RAlderman@central.uh.edu>
Date: Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 2:42 PM
Subject: RE: deadline pending act now – U of H factory disclosure PROVES SWEATSHOP use
To: UH SAS <uhusas@gmail.com>

Tim,
This is to confirm our agreement that if you delay filing suit against the UH Apparel Taskforce Committee for a reasonable period not to exceed September 1, 2009, I will either pay you $250, or hire you at the rate of $25 per hour.
Richard Alderman

The suit was filed April 1, 2009 and is captioned O’Brien vs. Alderman, 2009 – 20328, 280th Judicial District court