Cornell Quits Russell, with COLA’s Unacknowledged Help
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
For years, Russell Athletics wooed the Cornell Store with cheap sportswear, adorning their children/students with Big Red sweatshirts, Big Red sweatpants, and Big Red fatsuits. Their relationship grew so strong that Russell comprised around 15 percent of the Store’s apparel sales last year — at this apex of their romance, they thought nothing could bring them down. Unfortunately for the two starry-eyed lovers, there was trouble in paradise: trouble being Russell’s death threats to newly unionized workers, and paradise being a Honduran factory. Luckily, the Store was quietly informed of Russell’s human rights abuses by COLA (Cornell Organization for Labor Action), when the workers’ rights activists displayed the curiously illuminating banner pictured at right on last Wed, Feb 19. The very next day, the University quit Russell in much the same way one quits a lover who, by golly, beats his Honduran foster kids. The press release:
