United Students
Against Sweatshops Reject White House Defense of Fair Labor Association;
Call it Cover for Sweatshops
Vow
to Continue Campus Activism to End University Involvement with Sweatshops
Representatives of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), the campus-based organization that successfully staged sit-ins forcing major universities to take up the battle against sweatshops, took their message to the White House late yesterday, at the invitation of Gene Sperling, the President's Assistant for Economic Policy, and representatives of the Department of Labor.
The students called on the Administration to press companies to disclose the location of their factories and to permit independent monitoring for sweatshop conditions. Sperling was unwilling to meet the students' concerns.
"Without full public disclosure we cannot know whether a monitoring system actually improves working conditions. Sweatshops thrive in secrecy and are often guarded by concrete walls and barbed wire so that the public cannot tell what goes on inside. What is it that these companies have to hide? Why is the Administration so insensitive to this problem?" said Marion Traub-Werner, a senior at the University of North Carolina.
"Students all over the country will be unhappy that the Clinton Administration refuses to demand full public disclosure of factory locations, wages and monitoring reports," said Lyndsey Norman, a sophomore at the University of Arkansas. "Without these things, the FLA is nothing but a smokescreen for hiding unjust labor practices. Our message to the Administration is 'mend it or end it'."
The students' invitation to the White House meeting came days after the July 9th USAS protest in front of the Department of Labor. At the protest, students demanded full public disclosure of factory locations and living wage provisions in the Administration-initiated Fair Labor Assoication (FLA).
"This meeting was an Administration attempt to mollify our concerns about our universities' involvement with the FLA. But at our international organizing conference just two weeks ago, we heard from students representing more than eighty schools about the growing impatience on their campuses with the FLA's inadequate standards for protecting workers," said Miriam Joffe-Block, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania.
Anti-sweatshop activism gained momentum after sit-ins on campuses across the country earlier this spring. Students' actions forced more than 15 universities to resist corporate pressure and require their licensees to publicly disclose the name and location of their factories.This summer, the Fair Labor Association-behind the backs of students-started to solicit the participation of universities to mitigate the crisis of legitimacy brought on by defections of labor, religious, and human rights groups from the Association. The move brought students in conflict with the FLA, the anti-sweatshop initiative of the Clinton Administration.
"We have taken a strong position against the FLA because we disapprove of our universities' lending legitimacy to any institution which gives cover to sweatshop abuses. We will continue to organize against the FLA until there has been substantial change not only for disclosure and public accountability, but also for provisions of a living wage, real independent monitoring and a governance structure which is not controlled by corporations," said Maria Roper, a senior at Haverford College.
Following the White House meeting, USAS representatives announced intentions to continue to press their universities this fall to hold shoe and apparel makers to a standard of full public disclosure and a living wage, and call upon campus administrators to leave the FLA if these provisions are not adopted.
"Unless the White House is more forthcoming, expect renewed anti-sweatshop activities at universities this fall. Student consciousness is growing about the contradictions between President Clinton's labor-friendly rhetoric and his actions," said Peter Romer-Friedman, a junior at the University of Michigan.
United Students Against Sweatshops has affiliate organizations at over 125 schools across the United States and Canada. The organization was founded a year ago, and led the sit-ins and anti-sweatshop activism on university campuses across the continent.