Students could feel a little better about the Frosh shirts on their backs thanks to an unprecedented national student-run buying consortium.
Thanks to the consortium, schools across the country celebrated Orientation Week with fairly-traded, environmentally-conscious and union-made orientation week materials.
Typical “Frosh Week” items like T-shirts, tote-bags, laundry-bags, water bottles, lanyards, pens, and clipboards were collaboratively purchased by over 50 student unions, who sourced more than 200,000 items from ethical manufacturers.
The not-for-profit buying consortium was created by the Canadian Federation of Students-Services in order to provide ethically manufactured materials of higher quality and lower price than readily available “sweatshop”materials.
“By harnessing the collective purchasing power of students’ unions across Canada, we have made it easy and cost-effective for orientation week events everywhere to be sweatshop-free,” said Ben Lewis, Project Coordinator. “As far as students are concerned, this project marks the end of the ‘business as usual’ approach to sweatshop materials on campus.”
It is expected that this year’s success will result in greater participation in the ethical buying consortium next year.
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