Kaylana Mueller-Hsia, a sophomore at Stanford spent her summer interning for the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF). ILRF is a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. that advocates for low wage workers’ rights around the world. She culminated her internship with a week-long trip to Montreal where she participated in the World Social Forum with her supervisor.
Kaylana first became interested in the garment industry in high school because she was curious “about the background story of the industry of mass consumption that I was happily taking part in,” she said. She used that curiosity to inform her research for her main project in her PWR 1 class, “The Rhetoric of Global Development and Social Change” where she focused on the labor rights issues behind the ready-made garment (RMG) sector in Bangladesh. Kaylana sought to interview a director at the ILRF for her paper and subsequently learned about an internship opportunity with them.
“Thanks to that connection and the funding available at the HANDA Center at Stanford for student stipends, I was able to apply my earlier research at an organization that actively fights the labor rights abuses I had written about,” she said.
Building upon her PWR1 research, Kaylana’s her primary focus was at the ILRF was on the ready-made garment (RMG) workers in Bangladesh. “The RMG sector in Bangladesh totals close to four million workers, and accounts for almost 80% of the country’s exports,” she said. “The industry has been undergoing significant change recently following several tragically fatal factory collapses due to unsafe workplace conditions. Two agreements, the Accord and the Alliance, were created in 2013 to renovate and standardize factory safety in Bangladesh. Clothing corporations signed on to these agreements, promising renovation in the factories who supply their stores.” However, renovation has lagged past original deadlines. ILRF works to keep the Accord and Alliance’s signatories on schedule with renovations.
“This summer I did a lot of the background research on the progress of factories supplying well-known brands, such as Walmart, Target, and J.C. Penney. I used import data and the factory progress reports available online to compile statistics which were useful for our brand campaigning and advocacy work,” she said. “Additionally, I helped draft grant applications and write short pieces for the ILRF website. Although ILRF’s work on the Bangladeshi garment industry is distanced from the source of the issue, it is crucial during a time of new policy and unprecedented multi-corporation agreements that push towards improved corporate social responsibility in supply chains.”
Kaylana’s time with the organization was not without its challenges. “Working with ILRF really grounded me in what it means to run a small nonprofit,” she said. “A lot of my research was foundational information that was necessary but time consuming and tedious. However, without me, ILRF most likely would not have had the bandwidth to complete my work this summer, and it was important and useful to multiple campaigns, as well as to my supervisor. I truly enjoyed and appreciated having the opportunity to take my research past the classroom and let it fuel the larger movement of labor rights justice for low wage workers.”
