The Chronicle of Higher Education January 5, 2001

Anti-Sweatshop Groups Find It Difficult to Turn Campus Idealism Into Real Change 

MARTIN VAN DER WERF

The protests have helped turn college administrators into budding factory watchdogs. Now, however, as universities learn more about what monitoring of manufacturers will require, they are realizing that they are plunging into an underworld that few could have imagined: far-flung factories, some of them cities of 50,000 employees, where workers cannot expect a pair of gloves when working with hot glues and burning solvents, where fire exits -- if there is a fire exit at all -- are blocked by supplies or heavy machinery, where women are routinely sexually harassed and abused, and fired if they get pregnant. And where local officials look the other way.

Two recent factory-monitoring pilot projects performed on behalf of some universities show that workers' rights were violated in every one of 18 factories examined in nine nations, including the United States. There was no knowledge at the factories of the push on American college campuses for codes of conduct for manufacturers of clothing with college logos. Workers often did not know that many of their own employers have such codes.

"We were naive at the university level to think that we could adopt a code, and it would automatically be adopted in the world," says Rutledge Tufts Jr., the deputy to the vice provost for auxiliary services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "We've been sitting back and saying, 'It looks like it's going to be harder than we thought,' but we still don't think it's impossible."

Allan A. Ryan Jr., a lawyer for Harvard University, was more blunt.

"For us to have any impact, it will have to be with partners," says Mr. Ryan. "You've got to sit down with manufacturers, you've got to sit down with licensees, with labor unions, with human-rights organizations. The capability of universities to be able to do something simply as universities is really questionable."

While college-licensed apparel is a $2.5-billion annual industry, it makes up only about 2 percent of the American clothing business.

Against that backdrop, the Fair Labor Association, an establishment organization backed by a dozen major apparel makers and many major universities, and the Worker Rights Consortium, the choice of the student protesters, are trying to gear up their monitoring efforts.

At a board meeting later this month, the labor association is expected to certify its first group of monitors. Also, the first applications from companies that want a declaration that their products are produced "sweat-free" will likely be accepted. Earning such a designation will take at least two years.

Sam W. Brown Jr., the executive director of the labor association, says he expects that "nearly every" factory that is inspected will fail its standards. In theory, members of the association will not do future business with companies that fail to meet the standards.

"Everyone who is shocked when they see violations in factories has not been in too many factories," says Mr. Brown. "The changes that are made as a result of this process we are entering will be very gradual."

The labor association will concentrate on getting monitors in place in the 20 countries that produce about 80 percent of the world's apparel. But it will be years before there is a thorough, ongoing monitoring process set up in those nations, Mr. Brown admits, and even longer before there is much monitoring in nations where there are fewer factories.

The labor association has 144 American colleges and universities as members, and the consortium has 66. Thirteen institutions belong to both.

The Worker Rights Consortium is much slower to get going. The organization, which had its founding conference in April, named its executive director, Scott J. Nova, in December. Mr. Nova is the former director of the Citizens Trade Campaign, a coalition of labor, consumer, and environmental organizations that has been an outspoken critic of the World Trade Organization.

The consortium has been struggling for most of its existence with just one full-time staff member. Frustration among its members is beginning to show.

"It seems they could have accomplished more by now," says Lawrence R. Mann, the associate chancellor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which is a member of the group. "The W.R.C. has almost no resources. There is no staff to carry out the wishes of the board. I think it's going to be a long time, probably two years, before the W.R.C. will be in much of a position of doing anything."

The consortium has an annual budget of about $400,000, while the labor association's is $2-million.

Mr. Nova says he realizes that the organization needs to establish a presence by starting to work in some overseas factories. He is looking to hire a staff of four people, and says the organization hopes to begin some monitoring in two or three countries within "the next several months." But those countries have not yet been picked.

During much of the 1999-2000 academic year, students battled the administrations at numerous universities over the issue of which organization to join. The students complained that the Fair Labor Association is dominated and corrupted by the apparel industry, because companies' representatives get six of the 14 seats on the board of directors, while colleges get only one representative. Six of the other seats go to representatives of human and labor rights groups, and the other member is the chairman, who is selected from outside the other constituencies represented.

For the most part, the public skirmishes on college campuses over the differing approaches of the two organizations have come to an end. Leaders of United Students Against Sweatshops, which is closely aligned with the consortium, say that is a deliberate strategy. Although they do not rule out a return to protests and civil disobedience if their goals are not met, the organization is concentrating instead on strengthening ties to labor organizations domestically and abroad, and looking for students who are personally committed to the labor struggle rather than the adrenaline of protesting.

"We're trying to change this from a one-issue campaign to establishing a base that can be influencing human-rights and labor campaigns 10 years from now," says Eric Brakken, a national organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops, which is based in Washington. "We're only a two-year-old organization, and we want to make sure we're not just an isolated student movement, but make sure we are recognized by other organizations that have similar interests."

The anti-sweatshop group has opened a field office in Guatemala that is focused on creating ties with local human-rights organizations. Domestically, it is becoming more involved in labor issues on campuses, says Mr. Brakken, supporting job actions by janitors, food-service workers, and others in low-paying positions, and backing unionization efforts by graduate assistants.

The single notable protest this fall was at the University of Arizona, where eight students were arrested in November after locking themselves to the doors of the main administrative building, blocking access to it for much of a workday. Protesters say they are trying to convince the university that it should leave the labor association and belong only to the consortium. The university belongs to both groups.

Peter Likins, the president, says he thought he had been working constructively with sweatshop protesters, and found the protest to be offensive and counterproductive. "There is absolutely no way that demonstrating on campus will force me to leave the F.L.A.," says Mr. Likins. "I don't believe it is a healthy thing for students generally, or for society generally, to believe this kind of acting out will achieve its purposes."

Mr. Likins signed an agreement with protesting students in 1999 that the university would leave the labor association if it does not, among other things, strive for workers to receive a "living wage," carry out a policy of unannounced visits and independent monitoring, and ensure equal pay for women. He admits that the association has not met all of those goals.

"If 12 months from now, they don't have anyone in the field yet, I would start hammering them," says Mr. Likins. "If the field experience is full of what seems to be scandal and cover-up, I would probably leave the F.L.A. But I am not ready to make that judgment yet."

Mr. Likins, like many others, believes the problems in the apparel industry are so pervasive that it will take many years to make noticeable changes. The two recent monitoring reports done for universities, both released in the fall, bear that out.

One report, prepared for the Independent University Initiative, said there were subpar working conditions in all 13 factories producing collegiate licensed apparel visited in seven countries: China, El Salvador, Mexico, Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand, and the United States.

Among other problems, the monitors found workers forced to work extra hours, without compensation for overtime, prohibitions on collective bargaining, wages below the local legal minimum, discrimination against women, including lower pay and forced pregnancy testing, and widespread health and safety violations, including blocked fire exits, and cotton respirators rather than ventilators for workers working with harmful chemicals.

"The diffuse nature of apparel production hinders enforcement of labor standards," says the report. In addition, there are local laws that work against some of the provisions of the code of conduct. For example, in Thailand and South Korea, the maximum allowed work week is longer than the 60 hours stipulated by many codes. And in China, independent labor unions are illegal.

The Independent University Initiative is made up of Harvard and Ohio State Universities, and the Universities of California at Berkeley, Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Notre Dame.

The second report, conducted by Verite, a nonprofit monitoring firm, brought officials into factories where goods are produced for the brand names College Concepts, Gear for Sports, M.J. Soffe, JanSport, and Zephyr Graf-X. Each company selected one factory to be visited. They were located in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan.

The report was done on behalf of Boston College, Duke and Georgetown Universities, and the Universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Southern California, and Wisconsin at Madison.

In the report, the auditors made an initial visit to the factories, documented deficiencies in conditions, relayed them to the licensees, and then revisited the factories six to seven months later to see if the problems had been addressed. One of the licensees declined to allow the monitors back into the El Salvador factory, so only the other four factories were visited twice.

Again, monitors found some problems in every factory, including failure to post codes of conduct or company personnel policies, a requirement that workers reach production quotas before they can qualify for overtime pay, sexual harassment, and discrimination against pregnant women. Some of the problems had been resolved, but others were not fixed by the second visit.

Verite has been getting a lot of attention for its monitoring efforts. Founded in 1995, and now the largest nonprofit organization devoted to monitoring, it emphasizes the primacy of employee interviews as the best gauge of factory conditions, and now operates in 50 countries. "We have gotten into 700 factories now, and we are building a worldwide database," says Heather White, the company's founder.

However, the reports Verite does for companies are not made public. Ms. White says she supports public disclosure of reports if the industry is eventually going to be cleaned up. While Verite received permission from the factories to publicize its report for universities, in general, Ms. White says, "our only way to get access to factories is to agree reports will not be released publicly." Stipulations that all reports be made public, which is a requirement of the Workers Rights Consortium, are "unrealistic," she says, at least for now.

Most of the major accounting and consulting companies, including KPMG and Ernst & Young, have also started factory-monitoring practices, but the largest monitoring effort is by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

That company, however, was heavily criticized for its monitoring by Dara O'Rourke, an assistant professor of urban studies and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. O'Rourke, who has inspected more than 100 factories as a consultant for the United Nations and the Swedish and Dutch governments, accompanied monitors from PricewaterhouseCoopers while they visited two factories in China and South Korea for the Independent University Initiative report.

He reported that the monitors got almost all of their information from managers rather than workers. No effort was made to gather information from workers at their homes or other gathering places -- only inside the factories. They also missed glaring safety issues, such as workers wearing flip-flop sandals around hot-dye machines.

Officials at the accounting firm have denied the allegations, but admitted that their monitoring system needs improvement, and continues to evolve. Mr. O'Rourke also questions the operations of Verite, which is paid by apparel manufacturers for its inspections. Ms. White says the organization tries to avoid conflicts of interest because of its nonprofit status, and it tries to get operating support equally from three sources: fees for its inspections, foundation grants, and private contributions. She says 2000 was the first year in which Verite achieved the equal tripartite financing.

The Independent University Initiative report concludes that "there are no perfect companies to license your logo to, no perfect monitors to oversee these licensees, and no perfect monitoring systems."

The report recommends several ways in which universities could contribute to changes, such as educating workers about their rights, testing new methods for workers to report problems at factories, or translating audits of factories into the native language of workers and giving them a chance to comment on the findings. It recommends that universities might want to consider cooperating to centralize production of their licensed apparel because if there are fewer factories producing it, they will be easier to monitor and colleges will have more clout.

"Individual customers, especially universities, which often have relatively small production runs, many times have limited influence with factories, as their portion of the factory's production represents a very small portion of the factory's overall business," the report says.

Before colleges can start having more impact, though, they must answer some questions that seem basic but are immensely complex in the Third World.

No one really knows how many factories are producing collegiate-licensed apparel, or even how that term should be defined. Often, one factory produces the textiles, another factory sews the clothing, and the apparel is silk-screened or monogrammed in another factory. Yet another factory makes the zippers. Sometimes, apparel is not produced in a factory at all, but in individual homes, or by local residents working in a common area as a cooperative. And so on. How many of those workplaces should be, or can be, monitored?

How do you define a factory that is producing collegiate apparel? Does it include one factory producing T-shirts for one college for one day?

Right now, there are no answers.

Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education