Join us May 6 in New Orleans for the WRC Annual Meeting

January 31, 2020

Dear Colleague,

It is my pleasure to invite you to the 2020 Annual Meeting of the WRC University Caucus, which will be held on Wednesday, May 6, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.  For the first time in many years, we will not be meeting in Washington, DC. Instead, the meeting will be in New Orleans. We will be co-locating our meeting with CLC’s Collegiate Licensing Seminar.

Please RSVP for the meeting at this link.  

Please note we will shortly be sending a link where you can book your room, if you wish, at the Sheraton New Orleans, where the meeting is being held.

The meeting agenda will include:

• The impact of the forced labor crisis in Xinjiang, China, on the apparel industry and licensees’ obligations under university codes and US law;
• Unpaid compensation at university factories, recent successes in securing back pay, and the prospects for broader solutions;
• The effort to eliminate deadly safety hazards in South Asia, including major developments this year with the Bangladesh Accord;
• Key WRC factory investigations and remediation efforts at collegiate factories, from Indonesia to India to the Dominican Republic;
• The new ILO convention on gender-based violence in the workplace, and the model agreement spearheaded by the WRC—with Levi’s and other major brands—to combat sexual harassment;
• The labor provisions of the US, Mexico, Canada Agreement (the replacement for NAFTA) and their implications for labor rights enforcement in Mexico; and
• The effort to translate living wage promises from major brands into real wage gains for workers and the role of Alta Gracia Apparel.

We will also, as always, review organizational developments and provide a comprehensive overview of the WRC’s work on behalf of universities over the last 12 months. And there will be ample time for open discussion. If you have questions, or suggestions for additional topics we should cover, please contact me or our Deputy Director for Strategy and Field Operations, Jessica Champagne. We will be circulating a detailed agenda in the coming weeks.

I very much hope you can join us in New Orleans on May 6.

Sincerely,

Scott