The New Student Activism

Across the nation, students at major universities have angrily occupied administration buildings and pounded on chancellors' office doors, demanding that their institutions accept their rightful responsibility and take a role in ending the United States' involvement with the Third World. Is this a scene from 1969 during the opposition to the Vietnam War?

No, these protests happened in February 1999, and the targets of students' outrage are the sweatshops in Asia and Central America where the vast majority of university-licensed clothing is manufactured. Today, administrators from all the schools of the Ivy League will be meeting to decide the fate of those sweatshops and their abused workers.

At stake in this meeting is how far universities are willing to go to take moral responsibility for their practices. Last year, workers from a Dominican Republic hat factory licensed by Harvard, speaking in front of University Hall, told us that they are paid 8 cents for each $20 hat they make, that the factory lacks safe drinking water and that workers are routinely fired for trying to organize. The American garment industry grosses $2.5 billion per year from the sale of university-licensed products manufactured in plants such as these. Harvard can help to stop this immoral impoverishment by adopting a strong code of conduct that guarantees fair conditions in factories producing Harvard apparel.

To its credit, the Harvard administration has worked at length with the Progressive Student Labor Movement to produce a draft code that, while still problematic in some respects, would be far better than the negligible protections these workers now enjoy. The draft requires that wages cover "local family costs, such as food, shelter, clothing, health care, transportation and energy." If effectively enforced, this "living wage" provision would represent a vital step by Harvard towards the humane treatment of factory workers. Unfortunately, it is precisely this essential provision which could be jettisoned today.

We are also concerned that Harvard and the Ivy League refuse to demand public disclosure of factory locations. While the apparel manufactures claim that this information is a trade secret, disclosure is vital to ensure that those who monitor factory conditions are doing their jobs properly. With factory locations made public, sweatshops will have nowhere to hide. Major universities like Duke, Georgetown and the University of Wisconsin at Madison have already committed to full disclosure; in response, Harvard, a much richer institution with a national reputation for moral leadership, should not be afraid to join in this initiative. If American universities join together in making this demand, the industry will have no choice but to comply.

Public disclosure becomes even more crucial if Harvard decides to hire a private accounting firm to do the monitoring, instead of a non-profit organization such as Amnesty International. Recently, an independent study found that the accounting firm Ernst & Young's audit of a Nike factory in Vietnam was riddled with errors and oversights. Accounting firms are less likely to be familiar with local conditions and to earn the trust of workers than nonprofits, who typically consult with local community organizations. Furthermore, most such firms are or have been under contract to garment companies--an unacceptable conflict of interest.

Even after agreeing to ensure fair wages for its workers--even in the face of strong national momentum toward a code--Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League are posed this week to adopt the toothless, industry-approved, Apparel Industry Task Force (AIP) code that includes none of these provisions. Phillips-Van Heusen, one of the main proponents of this pitiful code, closed the only unionized plant in Guatemala last December soon after that code was announced--a good indication of the behavior we can expect from factories adhering to the industry code.

Workers from this factory will be speaking here next Monday about the horrors of working in a sweatshop. By taking part in a plan that doesn't include a living wage provision, Harvard would be going back on an important commitment to students, but more importantly, to workers.

In order for a University anti-sweatshop policy to change sweatshop conditions substantively, it must contain four key elements. It must guarantee workers a wage they can live on. It must require companies to disclose publicly the locations of their factories, because otherwise sweatshops can be concealed too easily. It must be enforced by a monitoring agency free from any industry influence in order to avoid conflicts of interest. And, because as students we are implicated in the policies of our universities, anti-sweatshop polices must provide for substantial student participation. A policy without these elements would leave it open to doubt whether Harvard clothes are manufactured in sweatshops.

When Ivy licensing officials meet on Wednesday to adopt the industry code's language, it will be in the face of the most energetic nationwide student movement in decades. In just the past two weeks, student sit-ins at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Georgetown, and Duke have mobilized hundreds of students for days on end and won guarantees of full public disclosure. Meanwhile, Central American and Asian garment workers make Harvard clothes under deplorable conditions, concealed by the continuous movement of the global economy. If we are committed to fighting global injustice, we must join with other American students to demand a policy guaranteeing that this outrage ends. Aron R. Fischer '99-'00 is a social studies concentrator in Dudley House. Benjamin L. McKean is a first year in Matthews Hall. They are both members of the Progressive student Labor Movement.