Penn State professor Samanthi Gunawardana worked in a Sri Lankan factory making Gap clothing and living in a flea-ridden boarding house for a year to understand sweatshop conditions.

Professor Mark Anner was injured in a bombing in El Salvador while working with factory workers to create unions.

Last night, experts from organizations such as the Fair Labor Association and Worker Rights Consortium spoke to a crowd of 65 people about the issue of sweatshop-made collegiate apparel.

Student groups United Students Against Sweatshops and the Student Labor Action Project held a rally Tuesday as part of a two-and-a-half-year campaign.

The students want Penn State President Graham Spanier to join the Designated Suppliers Program (DSP), which limits universities' apparel suppliers to approved factories.

Gunawardana and Anner both spent years studying the sweatshop environment of developing nations.

Gunawardana, a labor studies and employment relations professor, said she got interested in the effects of globalization and fair trade after her mother lost her job to an Asian factory.

Anner, also a labor studies and employment relations professor, lived in Central America for a decade helping El Salvador workers form unions. He said he helped create the world's first independent monitoring group for sweatshops.

Both said their personal experiences in developing countries taught them that workers are motivated to change their situation, but need help from consumers, corporations and governments.

Living among them

Gunawardana's family emigrated from Sri Lanka to Australia, where her mother worked in a textile factory. That factory closed up in one night to move to Asia where wages were lower, she said.

Gunawardana said she decided to spend a year, starting in 2003, at a Sri Lankan factory where 1,000 workers were paid 25 cents an hour to make apparel for companies such as Gap and Liz Claiborne.

Gunawardana said she spent about 12 hours a day making measurements and inserting drawstrings into pants. Workers asked Gunawardana to read the labels on the clothes they were making because they wanted to know what company they were working for. They also wanted to know how much an average garment sold for, and she said they were always shocked by the answer.

Gunawardana talked of living with other workers in a house, where the residents cherished their beds, even if infested by fleas.

Most of the workers were young single women who had migrated from rural areas, she said. They lasted about five to six years in the factory before exhaustion forced them to quit, she said.

Factory management allowed her to observe because "they felt they had nothing to hide," she recalled.

Working conditions were fair; the factory, unlike many others, had working air conditioning, she said. However, she said she observed frequent instances when managers told workers to lie to inspectors about working conditions.

Gunawardana said workers feared telling the truth about the factory because the factory could close, effectively taking jobs with it.

She explained that the workers did not eat properly because the work hours were too strenuous to allow for food or bathroom breaks.

She remembered one woman who came to work with a fever but was told by managers she couldn't leave -- so the woman sat at work all day, crying and making mistakes.

The woman told Gunawardana, "the target is more important than eating. Better not to be yelled at than to eat."

Training for promotional opportunities were only available to the five male employees, she said.

Unionizing efforts failed, she said, because activists were harassed, transferred to other factories, blacklisted or fired.

Working to unionize

When Anner teaches his employment relations classes, he speaks of unions he witnessed firsthand while living in El Salvador.

Anner was one of two Americans wounded in a bombing in El Salvador in 1989, he said. Ten people were killed and 29 injured when a bomber damaged the union building where Anner worked, according to The Associated Press.

His effort began after export-processing zones, commonly called sweatshops, emerged as countries tried to stay competitive in the global market, he said.

Governments are typically expected to monitor and punish for violations, but El Salvador officials were afraid enforcing laws would send companies elsewhere, he said.

An activist group went to the press about the conditions of a factory that made apparel for Gap, he said. Gap, embarrassed, asked several experts, including Anner, to form an independent labor group in 1995 to address the issues, he said.

For a year, Anner worked with the factory in what he called a "bizarre" process as a union struggled to emerge.

Anner said he once facilitated a meeting between a factory owner and union leaders that consisted of both sides yelling at each other for two hours.

"I thought it was the worst meeting ever," he said, but workers told him afterward that it was the first time the owner had ever listened to their complaints.

Searching for answers

Gunawardana said the women she worked with in Sri Lanka frequently complained about being viewed more as a part of the production machine than as people.

" 'Even though we're poor doesn't mean they can treat us like this,' " she recalled the women saying. "They do fight back, but they can't do it alone."

Gunawardana said codes of conduct, such as the Designated Supplier Program, are "soft regulations" that are helpful in combating labor violations.

She said soft regulations force American companies to scrutinize their conduct.

Gunawardana said Spanier thinks regulations such as the DSP impose Western standards on other countries. But many countries actually have better labor standards than the United States, she added.

Comparisons have been made between Third World countries' development and the United States' Industrial Revolution. But Gunawardana said the comparison is inadequate because the world had a different structure; no globalization or international organizations placing conditions on loans existed during that time.

Anner said a "race to the bottom" has begun as countries compete for the lowest standards with the cheapest cost. The winner used to be Mexico, but jobs are now going to China, he said.

He said the DSP could ask for wages to double and add only 38 cents to the overall cost of a garment. He said surveys indicate consumers are willing to pay a dollar more for a product.

"It is easy to dream up an answer," Anner said, "and the DSP is a stab at a potential solution."