Campus Awakening

By Jodie Morse

Like most freshmen at the University of Michigan, Peter Romer-Friedman came to campus wide-eyed and full of school spirit. After arriving in the fall of 1997, he decorated his dorm room with posters of his school teams, cheered on the Wolverines at the Rose Bowl and proudly outfitted himself in Michigan sweatshirts and caps. Then last summer, during an internship with the AFL-CIO, he started to hear how Michigan and other colleges get their sportswear--by employing licensing companies that use overseas factories where garment workers toil long hours, often for pennies a day.

Romer-Friedman returned to campus in the fall fired up--but this time about more than football. With the help of a textile union, he and a group of friends pinpointed a factory in the Dominican Republic where workers earn just 69[cents] an hour making Michigan hats. They demanded that the university begin monitoring the production of Michigan clothing, which brought the school $5.7 million last year. In mid-March he and 29 classmates stormed into the university president's office. After a 51-hour sit-in, they emerged with a pledge by administrators to improve the conditions of workers who stitch Michigan apparel.

At a time when campus protests are more likely to involve bans on booze than the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia, one cause seems to have galvanized students as nothing else in more than a decade. In the past three months the issue of sweatshop labor has sparked student sit-ins at Duke, Georgetown and the University of Wisconsin. Backed by unions and human-rights groups, students on more than 50 other campuses from Harvard to Holy Cross are circulating petitions, picketing college bookstores and launching websites calling for "sweat-free" clothing. At Yale, students held a "knit-in," doing needlework in the center of campus, and at the University of California at Santa Barbara, they threw a mock fashion show, lecturing on sweatshops while parading down the catwalk.

Though eschewing the more aggressive and often violent tactics of '60s campus radicals, these '90s-style protesters have made an impact. Michigan and Wisconsin, among other schools, have vowed to push licensing companies to disclose locations of textile factories and then guarantee certain wages and conditions for workers. "They have forced the universities to move on this issue," says Congressman George Miller, a California Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, who sent the students a letter of support signed by 23 of his colleagues.

But many in the education community are questioning whether the wave of anti-sweatshop protest is an indigenous resurgence of campus activism or the handiwork of a powerful outside agitator--organized labor. Since he took over the AFL-CIO in 1995, John Sweeney has brought labor's cause to campus, pouring more than $3 million into internships and outreach programs meant to interest students in careers as union activists. Indeed, it was summer stints at unions that first alerted Romer-Friedman and other students to the sweatshop issue.

Critics charge that unions--in particular the influential Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees--continue to call the shots. "The students are vocal, but it's hard to get a viewpoint from them that does not reflect that of UNITE," says Allan Ryan, a Harvard University lawyer who has negotiated with antisweatshop protesters. Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, asks, "How much of this student interest is really being influenced by unions whose main goal is to try to bring these jobs back to the United States?"

There is no doubt that UNITE has had a hand in generating student awareness of the issue. Starting in 1997, UNITE sleuths began tipping off students to the locations of alleged sweatshop factories. Since then, UNITE spokeswoman Jo-Ann Mort says, it has merely "given [the students] moral support." Lately that support has included participating in--and paying for--regular conference calls among student leaders on different campuses and coaching students over the phone during sit-ins. In February the union sent two sweatshop workers on a five-campus tour to spur greater interest in the cause. Though many student activists, like Marion Traub-Werner of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, say they discovered the sweatshop issue on their own, UNITE has clearly been helpful. After leading campus anti-sweatshop protests for two years, Traub-Werner got an invitation from UNITE to join a delegation on an all-expenses-paid visit in late March to a factory in Guatemala City.

"We are not manipulating students but motivating them," says the AFL-CIO's Sweeney. Either way, the outreach program has been a tactical masterstroke. "At this moment the sweatshop protest is definitely being carried on the backs of university students," says Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee, one of several human-rights groups that are also counseling the students. "If a hundred students hold a protest, they get a page in the New York Times. If a hundred union people did that, they'd be locked up."

Student leaders scoff at charges that they are mere puppets for union officials, pointing out that organizations of all political stripes have long looked to students to spark change. More important to the movement's quick rise, the leaders say, is the use of e-mail, which has enabled them to get the word out to students across the country. "There's no way hundreds of students would have marched up to a university administration building just because some human-rights group asked them to," says Tico Almeida, a Duke senior who led the campus rally back in January. "Students have grasped this issue and made it theirs."

And they aren't letting go. In the past two weeks 33 universities have signed on to a plan designed by the Fair Labor Association, a consortium of human-rights groups and manufacturers like Nike and Reebok, to come up with a uniform code of conduct for the apparel industry. Though the agreement has won the backing of the White House, a core group of student leaders has joined UNITE in opposing it as inadequate.

Still, the protesters have maintained the relatively polite demeanor of a movement that is, after all, an extracurricular activity. Rodolfo Palma-Lulion, an anti-sweatshop activist at the University of Michigan, says of last month's sit-in: "The point was to show that students are not apathetic, that we care deeply about this issue, then go back to class."

--With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Nichole Christian/Ann Arbor and Alison Jones/Durham

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Nichole Christian/Ann Arbor and Alison Jones/Durham