Clothing emblazoned with college logos is a $3 billion business. But starting in 1996, with the explosion of media attention around sweatshops, students began questioning under what condition the products sold in their campus stores were made. Receiving no satisfactory answers from their administrations, students began demanding that their universities pass Codes of Conduct prohibiting the purchase of goods made in sweatshops. By 1999, students throughout the country were staging militant sit-ins to demand not only strict Codes, but also serious enforcement of the Codes.
Coming together to form United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), the students became the vanguard of the anti-sweatshop movement. They took on individual companies like Nike, pressured the US Department of Labor to enforce standards, critiqued watered-down monitoring proposals, hosted garment workers on their campuses, and demanded that workers be paid a living wage.
A half-dozen universities have adopted stringent codes of conduct for manufacturers of apparel that bear their logos; many more are reexamining their policies. Under pressure from students, Nike agreed conditionally to provide locations of factories that produce collegiate clothing, and urged other manufacturers to follow its lead. The student movement is an integral part of the anti-sweatshop movement.
