February 17, 1999
USA Today
by Mary Beth Marklein

Princeton University on Tuesday became the latest site of student rallies urging stronger conduct codes for factories that make clothing bearing university logos. Rallies are planned at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell and other universities today, as officials from Ivy League schools gather to draft an anti-sweatshop code. Students on several other campuses, including the University of Michigan, University of Illinois, New York University and Penn State, are scheduled to meet with administrators on their campuses this week. Institutions that sell baseball caps, T-shirts and other items bearing their Insignias began showing widespread interest in the issue in 1998 amid reports that some factories were mistreating workers. But protesting students complain they have been shut out of key discussions on how schools can ensure their apparel is produced under humane working conditions. Ivy League schools are working out a code, and the Atlanta-based Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC), with help from a task force of 14 university officials, has proposed a code to Its 170 institutions.

Students say the proposals aren't strict enough because they don't ensure that factory locations will be disclosed and that workers will earn a decent wage.

"It's easy to have a shell code, something that's just the skeleton," says Suzanne Clark, of Brown University's Student Labor Alliance. She fears Ivy League licensing officials are not "willing to go the extra step to make a (good) code."

Like students at Tuesday's Princeton rally, Brown students don't plan "anything drastic," Clark says, referring to recent demonstrations protesting the proposed CLC code. At Duke and Georgetown universities and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, student groups marched to top administrative offices and stayed there, in some cases for days, until officials agreed to their demands.

Student organizers hope nonconfrontational meetings scheduled on several campuses this week lead to similar responses. "If they don't, I think we can expect more protests next week," says Duke University student Tico Almeida, a key organizer nationally. CLC vice president Bruce Siegal says the company will work to accommodate requests from individual schools, but adds, "We only hope that the student protests don't delay the process, which ultimately hurts the workers. The idea going in was that If we could come up with a singular code we could get this done faster and more seamlessly."