This catalog is what we have created as we begin to pitch these companies to UCLA retail stores to offer sustainable and worker-ethical options from our company partners that offer a higher standard of environmental justice, worker democracy, and worker health & safety. While this catalog is aimed at retail stores, we hopefully will be developing a version directed at student campus-based organizations very soon.
The catalog begins by explaining who we are and why we do what we do: for the justice of workers around the world, and the planet we wish to preserve. We delve into our organizing partners, which are the USAC Facilities Commission, the Labor 411 Foundation, and Ethix Merch. We detail our progress to date: all the surveys, panels, discussions, and guides we have released over the last year! We then go over our social media presence, and how we would seek to mobilize campus to actually purchase merchandise once it was in the store.
We give some love to our manufacturers, which are Unionwear, a USA-made, unionized garment factory in Newark, New Jersey specializing in small-batch, made-to-order products, Equal Exchange, a global network of employee-owned and small-scale growers, roasters, and sellers of coffee, chocolate, and tea (we aren’t only for ethical garment production!), and Collection, a cluster of democratically-run and employee-owned workplaces in North Carolina making merch from cotton to printed t-shirt. We detail prices, quantities, and order details, and then we get to the good part: the ask for retail stores to make a commitment to sell these products and market effectively, once we are able to secure a license! We have every step of the process down, from marketing to distribution, and want to make UCLA a world-wide brand that can also be recognized for a greater commitment to improving the lives of workers around the world.
