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[ Thursday, April 13, 2000 ]
PHOTO: Cara Davis Herter/Collegian
Students for Accountability and Reform (STAR) protest on Old Main lawn yesterday, as the Lion Ambassadors directed an open house.
Two anti-sweatshop groups court colleges with plans to monitor factories, disclose conditions
By Jeremy R. Cooke
Collegian Staff Writer
Student activists are starving themselves, braving wintry weather, marching into offices and risking arrest in support of the latest cause to hit college campuses.
In the campaign to rid overseas apparel factories of sweatshop conditions, a new player — the Worker Rights Consortium — has risen to challenge tactics already proposed by the Fair Labor Association.
For some, the arrival of the WRC provides a welcome alternative to the FLA. In coordinated efforts, student groups like Penn State's Students for Accountability and Reform (STAR) are lobbying their administrators to consider backing the newcomer.
But a comparison of the FLA and the WRC reveals that the two fledgling watchdog groups share certain similarities.
Both groups say they are committed to scrutinizing the practices of companies here and abroad who produce collegiate merchandise, such as any licensed product bearing the Penn State name and logos.
Nonetheless, neither existed in its current state two years ago, nor has either actually begun to send monitors in to evaluate, expose or improve working conditions in factories.
The theories and protocols that would separate or unite the two groups still mostly remain on paper, or in this case, on the Web.
The FLA and the WRC have outlined and publicized much of their plans online at their respective Web sites (www.fairlabor.org and www.workersrights.org).
Histories
While its charter was not adopted until last June, the FLA traces its history to August 1996, when the White House oversaw a partnership between labor and human-rights organizations and apparel manufacturers on how to eliminate sweatshop labor, said Sam Brown, FLA executive director. Penn State was among the first colleges and universities to sign on to the FLA in March 1999.
"We were involved in discussions that led to the creation of the FLA," said Penn State President Graham Spanier in an e-mail. "Thus, the timing of our joining was tied to the very beginning of the organization."
Meanwhile, since late fall 1998, a broad student initiative called United Students Against Sweatshops has encouraged universities to take a more active and direct approach to ensuring collegiate-apparel factories are free of sweatshop conditions.
Brown said the FLA offered members of the USAS a seat on one of its committees, but they declined it. The students instead helped to form the WRC, which completed its founding conference last weekend.
As of April 7, 43 schools had made at least a one-year commitment to the WRC. A number of those original members have chosen to jettison their support for the FLA, but 135 colleges and universities remain affiliated with the association.
The WRC has drafted bylaws and articles of incorporation, but the consortium is awaiting review by member school administrators before the documents are officially filed, said Maria Roeper, WRC coordinator. She added the group hopes to accomplish the establishment of its charter by June.
Philosophies
The FLA is preparing a two-pronged system of internal and external monitors to inspect factories on a regular basis. But the association has been criticized for its close ties to the industry it hopes to examine.
While the FLA has proposed issuing "public reports that will give consumers information they need to make informed purchasing decisions," the WRC says the only way universities can truly understand what is going on at manufacturing plants is through full public disclosure of conditions at the companies in question.
"Members of USAS believe that the WRC will force information regarding industry practices out into the light of day and pressure firms to improve conditions in factories producing their goods," according to the consortium's Web site.
Roeper said it is hard to expect factories to fix their problems by themselves or raise wages without pressure from the rest of industry. "The companies are only going to improve the conditions if the public eye is put on them and they're made to feel accountable," she said.
Governing structures
While not entirely in place yet, the WRC says its primary decisions will be made by a 12-person governing board, comprising six members of the WRC advisory council, three representatives from USAS, and three administrators from affiliated colleges and universities.
The 14-member FLA board includes six industry reps, six members from non-governmental organizations, such as human-rights and labor groups, one university rep and one overall chair.
The association and the consortium have advisory councils, which allow members schools to enter into discussions with the head governing boards.
Codes of conduct
Both groups have issued standards by which the factories can be evaluated, including prohibitions of forced labor, child labor, harassment and abuse, provisions for health and safety, and the right to organize and bargain collectively.
Schools joining the FLA are encouraged to accept the association's code of conduct as a basis upon which they can add other restrictions and standards. Instead of requiring specific acceptance, the WRC encourages each member college or university to adopt a code of conduct consistent with the consortium's list of principles.
Two sticking points in the debate have been the consideration of women's rights and the implementation of living wages. Noting the large percentage of female workers in overseas factories, the WRC makes a separate provision for its protection.
However, Brown said the governing board of the FLA unanimously agreed to include such a provision within the association's broader category of nondiscrimination and harassment. "There's more heat than there is light on this issue," he said.
The WRC also have made it clear it intends to help raise factory wages to a level more in concert with the costs of living, but has postponed its requirement of such a standard, pending further analysis.
"While everyone is concerned about a living wage, nobody is quite certain at this point what that means," Brown said.
He said the FLA is using a baseline study of 36 countries released by the Department of Labor in March as a foundation for its own study of living wages.
Plans of action
FLA-affiliated companies will have to allow some of their factories to undergo a regular series of announced and unannounced visits from independent external monitors, in addition to internal monitoring of all plants by the second year of membership.
Brown said monitoring should begin in earnest by this fall, after enough monitors are screened.
The association says it will publish annual reports on the monitoring results for each company, and the governing board will determine by majority vote whether the firm is in compliance with the FLA code.
Remediation must then follow to improve conditions so that the company can continue to be certified by the FLA.
"There is an actual mechanism that finds the problem, demands the solution and then confirms that the solution has been implemented," Brown said. Using a three-part method, the WRC intends to force companies contracting with its member schools to disclose full information about factory conditions, to "receive and verify worker complaints of abuses and violations" of the WRC standards and to coordinate unannounced factory inspections in areas where workers cannot speak up as effectively.
The FLA criticizes the WRC's planned strategy as "an adversarial approach," adding "it does not provide any way for consumers to know whether a company has adopted a code of conduct and committed to external monitoring," according to the association's Web site. Roeper said presenting a few model factories with decent working conditions is not an effective way to help workers .
"The industry has widespread abuses," she said. "At this point, there isn't a way to wash (it) clean of sweatshops."
Roeper said the WRC wants to empower workers to organize and complain when they recognize abuses in their midst.
Another organization
Amid the debate between the FLA and the WRC, Spanier said he was surprised that another organization — Global Alliance for Workers and Communities — has been ignored.
"The alliance represents a partnership among private, public and nonprofit institutions dedicated to improving the work and life opportunities for young adult factory workers," Spanier said in an open editorial.
"It is by far Penn State's greatest involvement," he said in an e-mail. "It involves the most significant area of financial commitment."
R E L A T E D S T O R I E S
