“I think students tend to not think about where any of the goods we wear are coming from or where they’re made,” said Sara Vitale, a comparative cultures and politics junior and member of Students for Economic Justice. “We don’t put a face behind production of things we wear every day.”

Manuel Pujols and Julio Castillo, two employees of the TOS Dominicana Hanes factory, spoke about their experiences working for the company and their struggles to unionize. The two men have worked at the factory for about two years, and both men hold leadership positions with their factory’s employee union.

When the two men first were hired, they believed the company would treat them fairly and wages and hours would be reasonable. But that has changed, said Castillo, the factory union’s secretary of conflict remediation.

“In a year and seven months, we have realized it’s nothing but trash that they talk,” Castillo said.

The factory produces cloth used for several sportswear companies, including Hanes and Champion. Factory employees work 12-hour shifts four days a week in conditions that are not consistent with labor contracts, Pujols and Castillo said.

Brand names such as Hanes do not technically own factories such as the one in the Dominican Republic, said Zack Knorr, international campaigns coordinator for United Students Against Sweatshops. Instead, the brand outsources production to poorer countries and then buys the garments at production cost.

Students can make a difference by putting pressure on university officials, said special education and deaf education junior Nina Chacker, a member of Students for Economic Justice.

Members of the groups encouraged the university to ask that companies adopt a designated suppliers program, or DSP, that would require brands to pay a higher price for products from their outsourced factories. The program also would make companies commit to outsource only to factories where workers have union rights.

MSU spokesman Terry Denbow could not be reached for comment about the group’s requests Sunday night.

Universities have contracts with brands such as Hanes and Champion for all logo clothing, and if those contracts are strictly made with DSP companies, labor conditions would improve in factories, Chacker said.

“Our university has a lot more ties to this sort of thing than students realize,” she said.

So far, three Big Ten schools — University of Indiana, University of Iowa and University of Wisconsin — have adopted these contract conditions with sportswear brand names.

“The DSP could work,” Vitale said. “We just need the student power behind it.”