TITLE:
Create a Sweat-free School at Gregorio Luperόn High School!
V.Hepner

Gregorio Luperon H.S.

INTRODUCTION:
Watch this video about how students at Gregorio Luperόn High School wear uniforms each day that were manufactured in sweatshops where workers are severely exploited and think about how you can help to resolve this issue in our school.

TASK:

• You will work with a partner to create an imovie that describes how the workers that create one of the articles of clothing that Luperόn students wear each day are exploited and provides a solution to how students can purchase their uniform from a “sweat-free” manufacturer and be proud of the clothes that they wear each school day.

• You will present your imovie at the March 2013 Parents Association Meeting to persuade the parents to change the company where student and gym uniforms for Luperόn will be purchased to a sweat-free manufacturer that guarantees the rights of its workers.

• You will complete an individual writing assignment in the form of an argumentative essay about whether you feel that you are helping (providing jobs) or hurting people from underdeveloped countries when you purchase clothing from

the companies whose factories are considered sweatshops.  

Articles:

• “Will Made in Haiti Factories Improve Life in Haiti?”

PROCESS/RESOURCES:  

Complete Worksheets #1-6.  Use the resources to help you.  Each worksheet will be graded.

· Define the problem worksheet 1
Resources:

• “Must Globalization Mean Sweatshop Labor?”

• “The Hidden Face of Globalization Part 1”
• “The Hidden Face of Globalization Part 2”
• Haitian Disney Factory Workers

• “Deadly Factory fires in Bangladesh Raises Questions of Worker exploitation”
• “Sweatshops”
• “Exploitation of workers around the globe”
• “Women and Sweatshops”

·  Gathering the evidence of the problem worksheet 2
Resources:

• Sweatshop News
• Sweatshops in Honduras
• Women Factory Workers in Honduras
• Factory Profiles
• “Lives Held Cheap in Bangladesh Sweatshops”
• Hanes sweatshop in Haiti
• “Sweatshops in Bangladesh”
• “Sweatshops in El Salvador”
• “Migrant Women Workers in Thailand, Cambodia, and Malaysia”(download)

·  Identifying the causes of the problem worksheet 3
Resources:

• Why are there sweatshops?
• Play: “Unfair Factory”

·  Evaluating the existing policy worksheet 4
Resources:

• Issues of workers rights

· Develop solutions worksheet 5
Resources:

• Altagracia: Living Wage Apparel (based in the Dominican Republic)

• SweatFree Communities: Shop with a conscience consumer guide
• “Sweat-Free School Uniforms”
• “By a Thread”
• “Altagracia model shown as viable”
• Altagracia video
• “Sweatshop-free clothing”
• No-Sweat Union Made clothing
• Justice Clothing - Union Made Clothing, The Sweatshop Free Alternative

·  Select the best solution worksheet 6

EVALUATION:

• Rubric for imovie

• Rubric for imovie
• Rubric for argumentative essay
• Rubric for presentation to GLHS Parents’ Association
  
  

CONCLUSION:
Thank you for working so hard to research the exploitation of the workers who make Luperonian students’ uniforms and for finding viable solutions to this problem.  You have gained valuable technology skills that have enabled you to present your research that you have used to educate the GLHS Parents’ Association, students, teachers, and other faculty at Gregorio Luperόn High School.

STANDARDS:
Social Studies
Standard 4: Economics

Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of how the United States and other societies develop economic systems and associated institutions to allocate scarce resources, how major decision-making units function in the United States and other national economies, and how an economy solves the scarcity problem through market and nonmarket mechanisms.