Alta Gracia Campaign
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Alta Gracia Campaign: Socially Just and Living Wage Apparel

Achieving social Justice in the apparel industry is extremely challenging. According to Sweatfree Communities, “Most of the clothing that enters the world export stream comes from places where labor standards are below international norms and conditions are substandard. China holds a 28% share of all garments imported by the United States. There, workers have no rights of free association; export factories regularly violate minimum wage laws; work weeks of 70 hours or more are common. In Bangladesh, among the top five apparel exporters to the United States, safety conditions are so bad that catastrophic factory fires, reminiscent of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, killed hundreds of workers in three separate incidents in just one deadly week in February, 2006. Bangladeshi workers earn 10-14 cents/hour and work 74 and more hours per week.”

Fair World Project supports and campaigns for Alta Gracia as an ideal and effective model for worker empowerment, and living wage, union apparel. Alta Gracia can currently be found at select universities and at Ethix Merch.

Alta Gracia is the victory of more than a decade of student activists and garment workers organizing to shape a better garnet industry. Alta Gracia worked with the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) to develop a robust code of labor  standards. The WRC is an independent labor rights watchdog that accepts no money directly from any company. The WRC has long been one of the toughest critics of labor practices in the apparel industry.
The key pillars of Alta Gracia’s labor code:

- Alta Graica pays a living wage to every worker more than three times the standard industry wage and enough to make sure that workers can feed, clothe, house and educate their families.

- Alta Graica respects the rights of the people who make our clothing, as workers and as human beings: including the right to a safe and healthy workplace, the right to be treated with dignity and respect on the job, and the right to form a union.

- Alta Gracia invited the WRC to verify compliance with these standards through intensive on-the-ground monitoring of our factory in the Dominican Republic.

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Learn more about Alta Gracia