The Chronicle of Higher Education
March 10, 2000
By Martin van der Werf

The Worker Rights Consortium does not officially exist, and won't until a founding conference next month. Its office is a room donated by a Greenwich Village church. Its only staff member is a Haverford College student who hasn't quite finished her bachelor's degree.

Yet this organization is bringing some university presidents to their knees, opening a new flank in the battle against collegiate-licensed apparel that activists say is produced in sweatshops.

Using an e-mail network, biweekly conference calls, and roaming organizers, United Students Against Sweatshops, a group that helped form the consortium and claims representatives on more than 150 campuses, is whipping up opposition to the Fair Labor Association, a well-financed coalition of apparel makers, colleges, and the U.S. Labor Department that was created last year. The association is led by Sam Brown, who once headed the Peace Corps and VISTA, and most recently was U.S. Ambassador to the Committee on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

In the past three weeks, the heads of the Universities of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin at Madison have ended student sit-ins, in part, by agreeing to drop out of the Fair Labor Association. Wisconsin agreed to join the Worker Rights Consortium on a "conditional" basis, and could become a full member if the fledgling organization can resolve the university's concerns about its governance structure and about its viability in the long run. Indiana University at Bloomington and the University of Michigan also joined at Wisconsin's urging. Last week, Penn announced that it would not join either organization until it agreed to put more university representatives on its governing board.

Those decisions amounted to a breakthrough for the consortium. All three Big Ten institutions are major sellers of college apparel. Until they joined, the consortium's only members were Brown University, Loyola University New Orleans, and Bard, Haverford, and Oberlin Colleges. None of those institutions sponsors big-time athletic teams, and none is a major seller of apparel.

The rise of the Worker Rights Consortium is the latest twist in a two-year campaign by students to stop colleges from selling apparel, such as sweatshirts and caps, made with sweatshop labor.

Last year, the Collegiate Licensing Corporation, which licenses products for about 170 major institutions, tried to put in place a code of conduct in cooperation with all of the manufacturers. The code would have required apparel makers to show that employees' rights were protected; that working conditions were safe and sanitary; that forced or child labor was not used; that hours were not excessive; and that collective bargaining was allowed. United Students Against Sweatshops, created in 1998, complained that the process set up to monitor the labor practices of manufacturers was not independent. One complaint was that the code would not have required manufacturers to reveal the locations of their factories.

Those complaints have continued as the Fair Labor Association has assumed responsibility for carrying out the code of conduct, also in cooperation with manufacturers. The student group, collaborating with labor unions, created the Worker Rights Consortium as an alternative.

Eric J. Brakken, an organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops, predicts more demonstrations and, possibly, civil disobedience in an attempt to pressure colleges to join the consortium before its founding conference on April 7. Institutions that join are required to send representatives to the conference, where the agenda is expected to include adoption of a charter and creation of a governing board.

Officials of the Fair Labor Association, meanwhile, after a year of crafting rules and building momentum, realize that they have a fight on their hands.

"We were very disappointed," Robert K. Durkee, vice president for public affairs at Princeton University, says of Wisconsin's defection. He is the only representative of colleges on the group's 14-member Board of Directors, whose chairman is Charles F. C. Ruff, best-known as President Clinton's counsel during his impeachment trial. "It would be even more disappointing if they decided to stay out," Mr. Durkee says, "because I think a lot of us feel the F.L.A. must be an important part of any monitoring strategy."

The group has signed up 130 U.S. colleges and universities (Brown belongs to both it and the consortium) and 11 apparel makers, including the industry giants Nike Corporation, Levi Strauss & Company, adidas-Salomon, and Reebok International.

Students fighting the association argue that it cannot effectively monitor workers' rights, because that amounts to the industry policing itself. Representatives of manufacturers take up six seats on its board. The other eight seats include six representatives of human-rights and workers' organizations; Mr. Durkee, representing universities; and the chairman, Mr. Ruff.

"It should not be [the apparel manufacturers'] role to set the standards. Letting them do that allows them to play both roles, of doers and watchers," says Maria Roeper, the lone staff member at the consortium's office, at Judson Memorial Church in New York City.

At Wisconsin, students opposed to the university's membership in the Fair Labor Association quit an advisory panel formed to write an anti-sweatshop policy. The chancellor, David Ward, agreed to drop out of the association, but students nevertheless occupied the foyer of his office for eight days, to underscore their seriousness. The sit-in ended only after 54 protesters were arrested when they refused to leave.

Roger Howard, the institution's interim associate vice chancellor for student affairs, says the students' arguments were persuasive. "The manufacturers' being so involved brings, at the least, mixed motives," he explains. "When monitoring may be against the best interest of manufacturers, how can they create an effective monitoring system?"

Wisconsin administrators admit that they knew very little about the worker consortium before agreeing to join it. "There really isn't anyone to answer questions," says Casey A. Nagy, executive assistant to the provost. "We signed up because we want to be at the table talking so we can influence how it evolves."

Of the differences between the monitoring systems proposed by the competing organizations, the most fundamental one is this: The Fair Labor Association would require some inspection of every factory every year by either external or internal monitors, usually with advance notice. The Worker Rights Consortium's system would rely entirely on surprise inspections.

No monitors have been chosen by either organization. The consortium says it would use only local human-rights, labor, or religious organizations to supply monitors. The fair-labor group says that it would require its monitors to be in contact with such groups, which it also hopes would agree to act as monitors themselves. But it expects applications from outside companies as well, such as the consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

The association has a $1.3-million budget and plans to hire about 20 people this year. The consortium has received a grant from the New York-based New World Foundation, and is applying for others.

The association hopes to begin monitoring factories by late this summer. The consortium may be a year or more away from setting up a monitoring system, says Ms. Roeper.

That exasperates some university officials, who say they have tried for two years to respond to students' demands. "We have some rhetoric, but we don't have anything else," says Mr. Durkee, of Princeton. "I have told our students, 'For us to join the W.R.C., you would have to show us what the W.R.C. brings about that the F.L.A. does not.' So far, they have been unable to do that."

Fearful that support for the Fair Labor Association was eroding, several backers have hurriedly spoken out on its behalf.

Stanley O. Ikenberry, president of the American Council on Education, wrote a letter last month to the council's 1,800 member institutions, touting the association and disparaging the new consortium for "adopting an explicitly hostile posture toward the companies that produce collegiate merchandise."

In an interview, Mr. Ikenberry says, "If the university community is going to have any impact on this issue, it will have to speak with a unified voice, and I believe that voice is the F.L.A. The whole effort will crumble if it doesn't have credibility and authenticity behind it."

Four of the Fair Labor Association's board members, representing human-rights, labor, and consumer groups, wrote to university officials to assure them that the group is not dominated by the apparel industry, but is open to the letter writers' criticism and to other opposing points of view.

The monitoring system proposed by the worker consortium "will not, by itself, be sufficient to improve conditions comprehensively across the apparel and footwear industries as a whole, or among university licensees," says the letter. It was signed by Michael Posner, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights; James Silk, executive director of the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School; Linda Colodner, president of the National Consumers League; and Pharis J. Harvey, executive director of the International Labor Rights Fund.

More pressure is coming from the apparel makers. Brad Figel, director of governmental affairs for Nike, says his company will back out of the process if the association fails. He calls the F.L.A. "truly the only option for us," given the company's investment of time and money in the group.

But the young people advocating for the Worker Rights Consortium are clearly delighting in its guerrilla campaign.

"The students are so committed to this. I guess this is what it feels like to be part of a movement," says Mr. Brakken, the organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops. Mr. Brakken, who was president of the student body at the University of Wisconsin at Madison during the 1998-99 academic year, graduated in August.

He was in Madison when the administration agreed to drop out of the Fair Labor Association and join its rival. He was also planning visits to universities in Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota to continue to drum up opposition to the group.

Mr. Brakken's habits explain why the organization is difficult to track. He travels alone, and keeps in contact with other members of the organization mostly through e-mail. He and the group's only other organizer, Rachel Miller, share a single cellular phone; she has it on her trips to Eastern campuses. He stays mostly with friends or members of his organization.

"We have a network of students on 150 to 200 campuses, and everywhere this is happening, they are running the same campaign," says Mr. Brakken.

He and many other members of United Students Against Sweatshops met through a program called Union Summer, sponsored annually since 1996 by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. It has placed more than 2,000 college students with individual labor unions, where they have learned about workers' issues and strategies for organizing.

"This is the beginning of a more sophisticated approach to power, and how to organize to win," says Elissa McBride, recruitment director in the organizing department of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. "That is something we have really tried to teach through Union Summer." The labor federation underwrote the costs of last summer's national conference of United Students Against Sweatshops, she says. It gives some money to the group, and encourages individual unions to do the same.

The leading union in the effort is the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees, or UNITE. Ginny Coughlin, coordinator of its anti-sweatshop campaign, is listed as a contact on the Web site of United Students Against Sweatshops (http://www.umich.edu/~sole/usas/); the site says the union "has been instrumental in our campaign."

But Ms. Coughlin says the link is not really that explicit. "The students -- what can I say? They are running their own campaign," she says. "We're not coordinating anything with them."

Mr. Harvey, executive director of the International Labor Rights Fund and a board member of the Fair Labor Association, says the unions have lured students with a message that "corporations are evil."

"What is duplicitous about what UNITE is doing is it knows it never gets anything until it sits down at a table with employers," he says. "And here it is, saying any organization that even deals with corporations is corrupted." Many students "are naive about the level of complexity within the American labor movement," he adds.

Several unions, including UNITE, once worked with the Fair Labor Association to draft codes of conduct and guidelines for monitoring apparel makers. But they dropped out last year, mainly because of differences over how to treat manufacturing sites in China. The unions wanted some countries to be off-limits to collegiate-garment manufacture unless the labor practices in those countries were changed. Apparel makers balked, and the unions walked, says Mr. Harvey.

"Every time people have tried to delegitimize what has happened, they say we are tools of big labor," says Mr. Brakken, of United Students Against Sweatshops. "There is no doubt we were assisted by labor unions when we set this up." But since then, he says, students have developed their strategy by speaking with international workers'-rights representatives and with academics who have studied labor conditions in the Third World. In some cases, students have traveled to key production areas, such as Central America, to see working conditions firsthand.

"It would be hard for anyone to say labor is in charge of this whole movement," says Mr. Brakken. "I think if you talked to the 54 students who got arrested" in Madison, "you wouldn't find that they've all been brainwashed or something."