DFP Staff/Tom Laudate--Students met with Boston
University administrators outside the president’s office
Stolen from Daily Free Press

Across the country on college campuses students have been fighting the involvement of their universities in sweat shop production of university products. Like the divestment struggles around South African investment in the 1980s, students are demanding that their universities divest from sweat shops and adopt a national code of conduct prohibiting the use of sweat shop labor in the manufacture of collegiate apparel.

The College Licensing Company (CLC), an industry group that represents universities in relations with the apparel industry, has drafted an anti-sweatshop code representing 160 colleges and universities. The CLC has requested feedback on the code from the schools it represents. The CLC Code includes requirements of no forced labor, no child labor under age 14, the right of workers in the factory to organize, no abuse or harassment, payment of at least minimum wage, and a maximum work week of 60 hours.

At many colleges students have staged demonstrations and even taken over administration buildings to push the school to adopt a code of conduct. In February at Duke University 21 students staged a sit in at the Presidents office which lasted 27 hours. Shortly after the Duke sit-in, students at Georgetown held a similar protest which lasted for 85 hours and at the University of Wisconsin students occupied the Chancellors office for 95 hours.

At some schools where the CLC code has been adopted students continue to protest, demanding even stricter regulations, hoping to force their schools to push for a more stringent CLC Code or to get their schools to adopt additional provisions on top of the CLC Code. At Boston University students are demanding a living wage guarantee (rather than minimum wage), a maximum work week of 48 hours, 6 months maternity leave, infant day care, and environmental policies in addition to the CLC Code which the school has already adopted.

Boston University had a rally demanding that the administration have a dialogue with students to discuss these demands. A week later there was a meeting between administrators and student leaders accompanied by a rally of support outside. The meeting ended after administrators told the representatives that they were not negotiating, merely discussing and they refused entertain further proposals to change the code. It is expected that BU was willing to jump on the bandwagon of the CLC code, but not willing to budge any further, which would threaten their profit-making.

Friends of RAIL was at this rally calling for the acceptance of the proposed code as well as increased student power on campus. Many students at the rally attacked global capitalism and the ruthlessness of the u$ as the reason why sweat shops exist. However, no one that we spoke to had plans to demand an end to this system nor to create a world where people in all parts of the world receive the same economic benefits. While RAIL supports the fight for a stricter code, we do so in the context that the fight continues until our final goal of equality is obtained.

One key demand added by BU students as well as those at other schools is student involvement in implementation and monitoring of the code. The CLC code does not include any such involvement and enforcement is mainly through self-monitoring. Schools clearly have no economic interest in paying more for the products they buy so it is the student pressure that is forcing them to adopt these codes. Without oversight and monitoring the administrations will be able to avoid enforcement of the policies.

Another key demand is full disclosure of the factories that are a part of the manufacturing process. Clothing manufacturers often subcontract work to smaller factories which means that some of the production is taking place in sweatshops which are even harder to trace to the product. Most of the anti-sweatshop activist groups are demanding that the Code of Conduct require companies that procure college apparel to disclose the names and locations of all factories they buy from. This provision will make it very hard for manufacturing to take place since the Third World, where most of the clothing production takes place, is filled with sweatshops. It is the norm rather than the exception that factories pay wages that barely allow workers to survive, require long work days, offer dangerous and unsanitary work conditions, employ child labor, and enjoy the cooperation of the government and the military in crushing any union organizing.

The movement against sweat shop production of college clothing is progressive and represents a huge step forward in internationalist and anti-imperialist thinking over struggles that focus on workers within u.s. borders. The demand that universities stop funding sweatshops by purchasing their products makes a personal impact on students who can make the connection between their school and the exploitation and oppression of workers around the world. And the struggle over provisions that will make it difficult for the CLC to continue manufacturing and profiting from clothing production helps expose the true nature of capitalist exploitation.

One important perspective that revolutionaries can offer to the anti-sweatshop movement is an understanding that this is not a problem of just a few bad factories. In fact, it is a system of exploitation and oppression that can not be legislated away under capitalism because it is the system that finances capitalism. While improving working conditions in sweatshops is a progressive goal, conceding that its ok to exploit the workers so long as they are not exploited too much is not going far enough.

We also need to make clear to the anti-sweatshop movement that just "buying American" is not a progressive goal. Factories in the u.s., which generally just assemble parts into a finished product using raw materials and parts manufactured in the Third World, are able to pay workers so well and offer decent working conditions and good benefits because of the exploitation of workers in the Third World. It should be telling to activists that the demands incorporated in the CLC Code, and even the additional demands of many student groups, do not come close to raising the working conditions or wages to the average level in the u.s. U.$. factories make their profits by stealing resources and exploiting the labor in the Third World: some of these profits are redistributed to workers within u.s. borders in order to keep them loyal to imperialism. Because of this, the disclosure provision that students are demanding is crucial.

Under capitalism it is important to fight winnable battles to improve conditions for the oppressed and exploited within the context of the anti-imperialist struggle. The current student movement against sweatshops is a good example of this. However it is important for the movement to build an internationalist strategy in order to fight for true human rights. The interests of the world's oppressed people goes much farther than a few reforms in the imperialist system.