With her recent passing at 106 years old, Jean Dolores Schmidt, a Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM), left behind a spirited legacy reaching far beyond the basketball court. Leading with a steadfast commitment to people and the planet, Sister Jean’s community partnered with CAL to integrate a groundbreaking legal mechanism into the supply chain contracts for goods produced with her image and likeness, or bearing any Sr. Jean quotes like her classic “Work, worship and win.”
The human rights and corporate accountability community will remember Sister Jean for her profound commitment to those her life touched, including workers in international supply chains.
As legal nerds and supply chain wonks, the Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL) team is not particularly stacked with sports fans; nor are we well-versed in sports trivia. But we all loved Loyola University basketball superfan Sister Jean.
As she rose to stardom during Loyola’s 2018 NCAA tournament run, so did the demand for Sister Jean-branded goods, from bobble heads to t-shirts, socks, and scarves. Sister Jean understood that the globalized production of those goods–like most consumer products today–could mean harmful impacts on workers and communities, especially as suppliers aim to produce as cheaply, and competitively, as possible.
Around the same time, CAL, which had recently been established as a legal design lab to imagine new ways to uphold human rights in global supply chains, was grappling with the fact that while supplier codes of conduct were proliferating across industries to address human rights risks, workers reported few actual changes on the ground. CAL saw this problem as an opportunity: those well-meaning codes could be made enforceable by workers and impacted communities, the people who have the most to gain from their enforcement, and the most to lose when their terms are ignored.
We found a natural teammate to test this idea in Sister Jean.
As a Jesuit university, Loyola had for years included strong labor standards in all agreements for the manufacture of Loyola apparel and other goods. In 2018, Sister Jean and the BVMs finalized an agreement with Loyola requiring future licenses for Sr. Jean-branded items to give workers and others impacted by production a right to enforce these protections, and a right to compensation from manufacturing companies that violate Loyola’s labor code or local environmental law.
For the last seven years, Sister Jean-branded goods have been produced for Loyola on worker-enforceable human rights terms with suppliers. When CAL embarked on this test case with Sister Jean in 2018, many were skeptical about the commercial viability of worker-enforceable codes of conduct—surely when the enforceability of human rights terms became more real, suppliers would be scared off. But when it came time for suppliers to renew their contracts with Loyola to produce Sister Jean-branded goods under the new terms, all rose to the challenge. A new era for human rights protections in supply chain contracts had begun.
As we reflect on Sister Jean’s life and the legacy she leaves behind, we are reminded of her leadership in the human rights and corporate accountability space. CAL calls on sourcing companies and universities that rely on codes of conduct to protect workers and the environment to incorporate third party beneficiary language into their supplier agreements, making the terms of those codes legally enforceable by workers and impacted community members. We also invite public figures to stand up for the people who produce their licensed goods to require worker-enforceable codes of conduct in supplier contracts, taking a page from Sister Jean’s playbook.
Avery Kelly is a Senior Staff Attorney at Corporate Accountability Lab. If you are a business or public figure interested in learning more about worker-enforceable protections in supply chain contracts, please reach out to info@corpaccountabilitylab.org.
