March 16, 1999

Students from the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) spoke out today against a move by 17 universities to affiliate with the Fair Labor Association (FLA), the monitoring arm of the Apparel Industry Partnership (AIP). Characterizing the move as only the latest attempt by the FLA to overcome its "crisis of legitimacy" following the departure of leading labor and religious organizations from participation in the code in protest of its weak provisions, students called for a moratorium on any further pushes toward university affiliation with the FLA until issues of full disclosure, living wages, and transparent, credible independent monitoring are addressed. In addition, they took issue with Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman's description of the effort as the result of recent activism around the issue, claiming that the announcement was a surprise and never a goal of the recent efforts. The students presented the concerns in a meeting with the Department of Labor and members of the Apparel Industry Partnership on Tuesday morning, but claimed that they left the meeting with their concerns unaddressed.

Nora Rosenberg, a student at Brown University, one of the schools to affiliate this week stated: "To characterize this effort as a °partnership' is not only misleading but an attempt to co-opt the energy on college campuses toward an end which undermines the principles that our universities are demanding. It is simply not acceptable for universities with existing codes of conduct to endorse an excessively weak monitoring mechanism without setting forth expectations for how that mechanism will be improved to correlate with our demands for full transparency and university autonomy. For those schools currently without codes of conduct, endorsing the AIP's standards * which don't even include full public disclosure of factory locations or any movement toward paying workers a living wage * is not even up for consideration."

"These deficiencies threaten to undermine the desire of university communities for full and complete disclosure of the conditions under which our garments are made. By affiliating with the FLA, we can still use disclosure to pull the fire alarm and draw attention to potential violations, but the whole process of verifying those violations and setting forth a corrective action plan will be both secretive and circumspect," said David Ferguson of Virginia Tech.. "The results of official monitoring will determine whether questionable licensees can continue to sell our university clothing, but the propriety of those who monitor those licensees is now in question."

Duke University, a school which has already endorsed a code of conduct with a commitment to mandate the full public disclosure of names, addresses, and contact information of manufacturing sites, is one such campus who affiliated with the FLA. However, USAS students outlined key weaknesses in the monitoring components of the FLA, even for schools which have committed to public disclosure. These include:

1. That full authority is invested in the Executive Director of the FLA to decide whether monitors should investigate third party complaints, without any accountability to the universities themselves.

2. That the decision of which organization will monitor specific factories is under the jurisdiction of the companies being investigated, not the universities who establish the code of conduct.

3. That companies will receive advance notification of monitoring visits.

4. That all official monitoring reports will be kept internal to the FLA.

In the past week, both Nike and the American Council on Education have urged universities to affiliate with the FLA. Students, however, issued a strong statement against any further endorsement of the FLA's efforts until its serious deficiencies are addressed.

"We recognize that this push by the FLA is only its latest attempt to overcome its crisis of legitimacy. Key labor and NGO actors * including the AFL-CIO, the Union of Needletrades and Industrial Textile Employees (UNITE!), and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility * have already pulled out, recognizing that the FLA is a weak and insubstantial coverup for continued sweatshop abuses. We will remain in solidarity with the labor and religious community by working against our universities' endorsement of the FLA."

"These schools went right behind the backs of the students who have forced universities to stand up for strong full public disclosure, living wage, and women's rights provisions in the these last two months. We believe that this is a huge tactical error on their part..If we are to make the manufacturing industry accountable to public outcry we must continue to demand strong codes of conduct which puts the human dignity of the worker first and strong monitoring which takes the codes off paper and puts them to work in the factories, thus far the AIP code and FLA monitoring plan have not proved that they have the capacity to do this, and we will continue to oppose its endorsement by any of our universities."