Students Give Sweatshop Fight the College Try

Taking up the cause of low-paid workers who produce the clothing sold in campus stores, students across the nation have staged a wave of sit-ins, teach-ins and rallies unseen since the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s.

In just the last two months, students have seized administration buildings on four major campuses--Duke, Georgetown, the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin--demanding disclosure of factory locations where T-shirts, jackets, pants and other clothing stamped with their college logos are made.

On Friday, hundreds of University of California students plan to converge on the Oakland office of UC President Richard C. Atkinson to ask for the same information, part of a national student “week of action.”

And in early May, UC Berkeley students will host a three-day training seminar for organizers in the national anti-sweatshop campaign. “It’s all about building a grass-roots student labor movement,” said John Isaacs of the U.S. Student Assn., who will lead the seminar.

Connected by daily e-mails and conference calls, the small core of activists who make up the United Students Against Sweatshops has brought youthful energy and idealism--not to mention national publicity--to an issue that labor unions and human rights groups have struggled to spotlight for years.

Not only have they struck a moral chord with their peers and a handful of sympathetic faculty members, but the students also have gotten the attention of university administrators and manufacturers in the fast-growing collegiate apparel industry, which takes in about $2.5 billion a year.

Since last summer, a half-dozen universities have adopted stringent codes of conduct for manufacturers of apparel that bear their logos; many more are reexamining their policies.

Last month, after months of refusal, Nike agreed conditionally to provide locations of factories that produce collegiate clothing, and urged other manufacturers to follow its lead.

“This industry really relies on sweating the profits out of labor,” said Tom Wheatley, a graduate sociology student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who emerged as a national figure in the movement after helping to lead a four-day takeover of the chancellor’s office last month.

“They’re among the worst of the worst, as far as the way workers are treated and the wages they’re paid,” he said. “It really is quite sick. Fourteen-year-old girls are working 100-hour weeks and earning poverty-level wages to make my college T-shirts. That’s unconscionable.”

Industry leaders take issue with such characterizations, arguing that their global factories create needed jobs and give the world’s poorest economies a chance to grow.

Manufacturers say they pay local prevailing wages or better. And even student critics concede that in many countries, U.S.-built plants offer better conditions than others.

“When Nike has gone into a country with its manufacturing operations, wages have increased and poverty has decreased,” said Nike Inc. Chief Executive Philip Knight, whose company produces a large line of collegiate apparel. “Nike, of course, is not solely responsible for that, but we have been part of that process and we are proud of it and not ashamed of it.”

Still, manufacturers have long refused to disclose their factory locations or even the names of subcontractors--a central demand of students, who have peppered their arguments with anecdotal reports of worker abuse from the Dominican Republic to Vietnam.

“It was horrible,” said Arlen Benjamin-Gomez, 18, a UCLA freshman who traced a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt she bought on campus to an industrial complex in Honduras where she believed it was made. “The worst thing is the pay. Workers earn only $3 a day. That might be OK if it was cheaper to live there, but it’s not.”

Benjamin-Gomez made the trip in September with her mother, longtime San Francisco human rights activist Medea Benjamin. For two weeks, they interviewed workers, labor leaders and human rights activists, as well as industry representatives, who said clothing assembly has created 100,000 jobs at 18 new industrial parks.

The trip resulted in a 25-minute video, dubbed “Sweating for a T-shirt,” now screening to potential activists on campuses throughout California.

It is a powerful recruiting tool: Images of a clean, well-lit factory where hundreds of sewing machine operators produced Dockers pants in grim silence are interspersed with footage from the squalid shanties where the workers live.

Pro-union sympathies run strong among the students, many of whom have been coached in organizing tactics by members of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees as well as the AFL-CIO, which has wooed college students under the leadership of President John Sweeney.

But students chafe at suggestions that their protests have been orchestrated or directly influenced by labor unions.

Indeed, collegiate clothing is an exploding industry that not only markets heavily to students, but also benefits their schools through royalty payments.

Sales of the university logo brought $1.2 million to UCLA last year. At the University of Michigan, the national leader, 1998 royalties amounted to $5.7 million.

Students argue that workers who make those clothes should share in the profit--at least to the point of earning a comfortable “living wage.”

“When [manufacturers] are making hundreds of millions a year, to give a 30-cent-a-day wage increase would not be severe,” said Jason Mark, a spokesman for Global Exchange, a San Francisco human rights group that has assisted the student movement. Medea Benjamin is the organization’s director of corporate responsibility.

Some student demands--such as guarantees of gender equality and a living wage that could be several times the country’s minimum wage--may strike those in the industry and even more moderate human rights groups as unrealistic.

Still, there is little doubt that the students have made a difference.

“Student energy and activism is encouraging debate on a number of important issues like wages,” said Michael Posner, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, who has been chided by students for being too friendly with manufacturers. “They’re going to keep providing a source of accountability, to push us to be tough.”

To the frustration of some school administrators and manufacturers, students have been intransigent on one point: They refuse to give their blessing to a new government- and industry-backed association being formed to monitor overseas garment shops, known as the Fair Labor Assn.

This week at Berkeley, they will present an alternative monitoring plan. But time is running against them. More than 50 schools have already affiliated with the Fair Labor Assn., and many more--including the UC system--appear to be leaning in that direction.

In an exasperated response to student demands in late March, UC Senior Vice President V. Wayne Kennedy urged a more pragmatic approach. “If code-of-conduct provisions are as detailed and all-encompassing as some have suggested they be,” he wrote, “the adoption of a code becomes an empty gesture because of the virtual, if not literal, impossibility of enforcement.”

But for some administrators and faculty members--former dissidents themselves--the sight of students doggedly standing their ground brings nostalgia and hope.

Among them are Richard Appelbaum, a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara, who is helping students at that campus organize a plebiscite on the question of sweatshops.

“The job of a student is to be unrealistic,” said Appelbaum, who co-authored a recent study on the Los Angeles garment industry. “Someone has to raise the issues in their pure form and push for a dream. What results may be more progressive than what would have been otherwise.”