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In the KnowStudent Sweatshop ProtestsA campaign for human rights in the workplace --- and an end to sweatshop and child labor --- has received a major lift from campus-based protests in recent months. Students at Duke University, Georgetown University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison have used sit-ins recently to dramatize their efforts to end sweatshop labor on university-licensed apparel and other products. At Princeton, Cornell, Harvard, and Yale, as well as many other campuses, students have held protests over the same issue. The student activists want their universities to require companies that manufacture products bearing the institutions' names to fully disclose the locations of their factories and adopt a living wage standard for workers in the plants --- in addition to following a fair labor code of conduct. So successful have these student protests been that the American Council on Education has sent to its 1,800 member colleges and universities a letter promoting a new nonprofit organization that will attempt to enforce such a workplace code of conduct. The Fair Labor Association's workplace code of conduct requires manufacturers to certify they do not use forced labor or child labor, do not discriminate, treat their employees with respect, provide a safe and healthy work environment, recognize the right of employees to form unions and bargain collectively, and abide by local wage and hour laws. The letter lists 17 colleges and universities that have already indicated their intentions to join the Fair Labor Association. Some of these --- the University of Michigan, which makes $5 million a year from the $2.5 billion a year collegiate-licensing business --- the University of Wisconsin, Notre Dame, Duke, and Princeton signed on to the code, while noting they will also require companies they work with to disclose the locations of the factories where their products are made. This is one of the key demands of the students, who insist that monitoring is ineffective without full disclosure of plant locations. The students who sat in at Michigan also demanded that the workers making logo items be paid "a living wage." The Fair Labor Association calls for wages to be in accord with local minimum or prevailing wages. |
