After nearly two years of letters, protests, and threats of contract terminations, Nike announced July 26 that it would assist workers laid off from two of its subcontractors’ factories in Honduras.

The New York Times reported that Nike would set aside $1.54 million for a ‘worker-relief fund’ that would help former employees of Hugger de Honduras and Vision Tex find new jobs, in addition to providing vocational training and health coverage.

The decision represents a major victory for United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), a national student-advocacy group for workers’ rights, which had been pressuring Nike to pay $2 million of severance it owed to the factory employees.

“It was all due to students,” said Garrett Strain, spokesman for the UW Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), a USAS member organization. “Without USAS, the violations would have gone unnoticed or unchecked … Nike would never have acted if not for this national campaign which tarnished their image and forced them to act in the end.”

USAS and its member organizations also lobbied universities, including the UW, to suspend their licensing contracts until Nike relented. The University of Wisconsin—Madison and Cornell University terminated their contracts with Nike earlier in the year, and this month, numerous UW student groups published an open letter to President Mark Emmert, demanding that he also allow the UW’s $1 million licensing contract to expire.

“We are delighted at this outcome,” Emmert said in a statement on Monday. “More than taking responsibility for correcting the violations of its subcontractors, Nike’s actions chart a responsible course for its competitors to follow in similar situations.”

Strain expressed satisfaction with Nike’s decision, but not with the UW administration’s lack of action.

“Although this was a victory, we had to wait one-and-a-half years,” Strain said. “If Emmert had cut the contract the first time we had evidence that Nike had egregiously violated workers’ rights, we could have seen the campaign end six months, even a year ago … I don’t think that we can in the future be an institution that’s a follower in protecting workers’ rights. We have to be at the forefront, we have to be the leader.”

With the Nike controversy settled, Strain said that SLAP’s next project would be to lobby for campus workers’ rights in the face of looming budget cuts.

Reach reporter Tiffany Vu at news@dailyuw.com.