USAS: A History of the Student Anti-Sweatshop Movement
On Friday afternoon, Jan.29 1999, about twenty Duke students
marched into the lobby of their president’s office where
they would stay for 31 hours before winning a compromise
agreement. Seven days later Georgetown students sat-in for
85 hours and three days later Madison students did 97 hours.
These actions were widely covered in the media, put the
student anti-sweatshop movement on the map, and were only
the beginning of a new large progressive student movement.
During the rest of the spring semester there were four more
sit-ins, with Arizona students setting a new record at 225
hours. And that’s not to mention what happened in 2000!

This article gives a general overview of the student anti-
sweatshop movement. I will explain the movement’s history as
well as addressing its tactics, current goals, and possible
future direction. While sweatshops are not a traditional
environmental issues, SEACers at many schools (e.g. UNC,
Syracuse, SUNY ESF, Notre Dame, Skidmore, UNH, Virginia Tech
– to name a few) are working on it, and activists who are
focussing elsewhere can still learn and be inspired by this
movement’s success.

History
Anti-sweatshop activism preceded the student movement by at
least several years. A recent pivotal event occurred in 1996
when Kathie Lee Gifford was exposed as having produced some
of her clothing line in sweatshops in NYC and Honduras. The
subsequent public outcry led to the government-sponsored
formation of the Apparel Industry Partnership (AIP) which
created a draft Code of Conduct (a minimal set of working
conditions that factories must follow) in April 1997. Also
UNITE (Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile
Employees) increased their organizing efforts, hiring
interns who developed a campus anti-sweatshop campaign over
the summer of 1997.

During the 1997/1998 school year, the first student anti-
sweatshop groups were organized at schools, and students
started to campaign against Nike and Reebok and also to get
their school to adopt a Code of Conduct. Duke students make
their university adopt a code in November, and the Brown
Student Labor Alliance drafts a similar one in March 1998.
That following summer, the movement began to take form as
fifty students gathered for a meeting in New York, creating
United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). Also USAS sent a
small student delegation to El Salvador to witness
sweatshops conditions.

In the fall of 1998, the Apparel Industry Partnership broke
apart as the unions and most of the non-governmental
organizations decided that the AIP code of conduct was too
weak. But corporations stayed on board, as did a minority of
non-governmental organizations, and they formed the Fair
Labor Association (FLA). Also a group that was already
responsible for a lot of college apparel, the Collegiate
Licensing Company, created a Code of Conduct that was
similar to the AIP/FLA one.

On Jan. 9, 1999, USAS had a vision-setting meeting in NYC,
where thirty-five students created working groups, and
planned for a day of action. Students were concerned that
their schools would be signing-on to the CLC Code of
Conduct, while it lacked provisions guaranteeing workers a
living wage, the right to organize a union, women’s rights
(ex. freedom from forced contraception, maternity leave,
etc.), and full public disclosure of the factory locations.
Full public disclosures would permit independent
organizations to investigate the working conditions at
university apparel producing factories, as a check on the
accuracy of a university’s monitoring program. At the end of
January, when Duke students sat-in, they became the first
school to win a commitment from their administration to
implement full public disclosure within a year. With this
first wave of sit-ins, the movement started to grow
exponentially. Students who read in their campus newspapers
what was happening got interested and created groups. USAS
members relied upon the email list and regular conference
calls to network. They shared tactics, and discussed codes
of conducts, sweatshops, and pros and cons of different
monitoring systems. The movement crossed the border, as
Canadian students held their first conference in February.

The Empire (Nike) Strikes Back
By March, the Fair Labor Association had become an actual
organization and it persuaded seventeen universities to join
as founding members. Nike CEO, Phil Knight, even wrote a
letter to university and college presidents encouraging them
to join! In response, USAS rapidly developed a critique of
the FLA. The FLA did not adequately protect women’s rights,
the right to organize, a living wage, and kept the location
of factories secret. It only required that factories be
monitored every ten years (very low considering the high
level of mobility in the industry), and even allowed
corporations to recommend which factories should be
monitored. Also monitoring results would not be made public.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, it gave the same corporations
that contract their work to sweatshops a veto over all major
decisions. Activists analyzed the organization and charged
that the FLA was designed as public relations tool, that it
would create a “sweat-free” label without sufficiently
improving working conditions. Students feared that if the
FLA succeed in creating this label, it could convince the
public that sweatshops were being “dealt with” and kill the
overwhelming public support for the anti-sweatshop movement!
By June, a hundred schools had joined the FLA. What were
students to do?

In May twenty-five students attended a vision-setting
conference to plan a response. They also helped organize
USAS’s first national conference which had over two hundred
participants in July. The AFL-CIO hosted it in their retreat
center near DC. Students participated in workshops, long
plenary and breakout sessions, singing labor songs,
networking and created a coordinating committee. Working
with other anti-sweatshop activists, students began to
develop an alternative monitoring system that would solve
the shortcomings in the FLA. Several months later, USAS
announced the formation of the Worker Rights Consortium
(WRC). The WRC includes a living wage, the right to
organize, women’s rights, and bans forced overtime. In terms
of accountability the WRC will publicly disclose not only
the locations of factories, but also will annually release a
report on the working conditions at each factory. Finally
the WRC is governed by an equal number of administrators,
students, and non-governmental organizations – sweatshop
corporations do not get to vote. That fall, Brown University
and Loyola New Orleans became the first two schools that
committed to join the WRC.

With USAS’s initial success and media darling status in the
spring, money began to flow in from unions and foundations,
allowing USAS to open an office in DC initially with only
one staff person in the Fall, and adding another in January
2000.

The fall was not super-exciting, as it was a time for
students to start new groups, do education and outreach
work, and to start negotiating with their administration.
And with only two schools committed to joining the WRC, the
future success of USAS remained in doubt. However the spring
changed everything. With renewed fervor, students everywhere
demanded that their schools join the WRC and leave the FLA.
In early February, University of Pennsylvania students set
the tone by sitting-in for over eight days, culminating in a
nationally supported 48-hour fast which forced their
administration to become the first school to leave the FLA
(though they failed to join the WRC). Pressure built as
students worked to get their school to join the WRC in time
for the April founding meeting. Simultaneous sit-ins at
Wisconsin and Michigan pushed the first three major
licensing schools (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana) to join
the WRC all together. The movement was expanding from
sweatshops to also addressing the treatment of university
workers. For instance, students at Johns Hopkins demanded
that their school join the WRC and adopt a living wage in
their record seventeen-day sit-in. That spring whopping
fourteen schools had sit-ins for either sweatshops or
student-labor issues. The excitement was contagious. The
success of each sit-in and each new school that joined the
WRC inspired students at other campuses to redouble their
campaigns. Often with several sit-ins going on at once, the
momentum kept building until by the time the WRC met in
April, the movement had done what once seemed impossible and
over forty schools had joined!

Students did some amazing work. For instance Macalester
students knocked on not only every door in the residential
halls, but also canvassed the faculty too! By calling short
impromptu meetings in a convenient location for people, they
built the support they need to pull-off a successful sit-in
– and once they held their action the number of participants
doubled. Iowa students held a teach-in during their sit-in
which educated between 1000 and 1500 students. Arizona’s
1999 sit-in guest book showed over 300 people visited them.
Students at the five-college Claremont system first occupied
the administration building at Pomona College in support of
cafeteria workers attempts to unionize. Unlike most other
sit-ins, instead of being content with a lobby or hallway,
they actually conned the maintenance workers and took-over
the building, locking the administrators out. After the
occupation, they hit Pitzer College with a two-day blockade
of seven entrances to the administration building (leaving
one basement entrance open). 180 students participating in
soft-blockades and several people U-locked themselves
directly to the doors. Often organizing a sit-in transformed
a campaign from a group where several students did all the
work, to a large group of activists with offers of support
from new people who had not been previously involved.

While the first wave of sit-ins in spring 1999 were all
generally tolerated by the university, at some schools the
second wave met with a sharply different reaction. The
repression started with the 4am police raid and arrest of
fifty-four Wisconsin students. Subsequent police action saw
students also arrested at Iowa, Kentucky, SUNY Albany, and
Oregon for a total of 103 arrests. University of Kentucky
students had the hardest time with their action, as their
sit-in lasted only 8 hours before the police made them
leave:

"They were experts at singling us out one by one and
intimidating us. They told us we wouldn't graduate. They
told us we couldn't get accepted to the bar. They told us we
would lose scholarships. They were very skilled at
harassment. They've obviously had practice. Additionally,
there were indirect threats of injury when the arrest
process began," said Lindsey Clouse, one of the U Kentucky
USAS members arrested at 1:45am Wednesday morning, April 5
2000.

The increased repression might be a response to the fact
that student demands had increased from asking their
university to adopt a Code of Conduct, to actually
committing money to enforce fair working conditions. Also
administrators may have realized that if they let student
activists occupy lobbies and hallways, then the tactic will
become very popular since it lets students get their message
across to the media. While it is not readily apparent, in
this wave of sit-ins there is a kernel of a larger challenge
to administrations’ ability to make all of the major
decisions on university policy. Some students were not
sitting in just to fight sweatshops, but also to transform
their campus into a democracy where the voices of students,
faculty, and staff are all equally respected. This was the
case at least at Wisconsin and Oregon.


What is the movement asking?
The anti-sweatshop movement is asking for substantial
reforms to the way goods are produced. The goal is to
empower workers so they can make and achieve their own
demands. We want to support existing worker struggles,
rather than impose an American ideal of what a working place
should be like. Clothing is just a starting place to tackle
global working conditions, and we are using it because
conditions in the apparel industry are among the worst. The
movement is not asking for a boycott of goods produced in
sweatshops, as that would cause workers to lose their jobs.
Rather we are asking that existing producers be required to
uphold a higher standard. Universities are able to require
this standard because they have a monopoly in sales of
apparel with their logo. Also conditions can be improved in
the entire apparel industry, as labor costs are currently a
very small fraction of the final retail price. Paying
workers a living wage and improving labor conditions might
increase the price of the retail good by 1-3%, but that will
have very little impact upon final sales especially when
compared to how much it will help the workers.

Ultimately the movement is creating an alternative to
corporate-sponsored globalization. Instead of pushing wages
to the bottom, and moving production to countries with the
weakest environmental regulations we can use globalization
to lift people up.


Not just Sweatshops
Like SEAC’s broad definition of the environment which
includes people and the conditions we live and work in, USAS
has a broad definition of sweatshops which extends to
revitalizing the working and middle class through a strong
democratic labor movement. This includes both traditional
union organizing and also direct action – in the streets and
even in our administration buildings.

USAS members are trying to build strong student-labor
alliances that have historically been very weak in the
United States. Conscious of its roots in primary elite
institutions (and mostly white upper-middle class students),
like SEAC this movement includes an anti-oppression
analysis, attempting to create a diverse non-oppressive
space within itself as well as society. USAS has caucuses
for self-identified lgbtqs, women, working class, and
students of color – each of whom are represented on the
governing board.


The future
USAS has gone through such rapid growth in its two-year
existence that its future is hard to predict. Will radical
students be able to work with admittedly less radical
unions? What will happen once most universities have created
codes of conduct and joined a monitoring system? I suspect
USAS will shift its focus to supporting campus workers (both
creating unions and supporting living wage campaigns),
community struggles, and a continued focus on resisting
corporate-sponsored globalization (ex. Seattle WTO protest,
and DC IMF/World Bank). If USAS does move into U.S. labor
organizing, it should be able to avoid SEAC’s pitfall of
losing funding as the environmental movement became less
sexy, as it will be able to count upon union financial
support. I suspect that students will find union recognition
campaigns to be many times more difficult than their
previous campaigns, requiring long hours of talking to
workers to gain their trust before they agree to take the
risk and form a union. There is a big economic and cultural
gap between college students and workers. Just sitting-in
won’t be enough. However a strong democratic labor movement,
allied with other social movements, is one of our best
chances to restore democracy to the United States. Once we
build it, perhaps then we can create a social-democratic
labor-based party like most industrialized countries have
(Ex. Canada, England, France, Germany, etc). - a party that
will truly represent the interests of the people, empower
workers, support human rights, promote diversity, and save
the environment from corporate destruction.

The student anti-sweatshop movement, as organized into USAS,
is currently the strongest focussed national progressive
student movement. There are more sit-ins than any time in
the past thirty years, and unlike the Sixties where students
completely took-over buildings, these mostly tamer sit-ins
(where often administrators or campus security sits-in with
the students – in exchange for university tolerance of the
action) are proving more effective in gaining public support
and thus winning their goals. It is inspiring to see student
activists in the headlines and to realize the power that we
have if we dare to organize and do nonviolent direct action.


Pictures
(get pictures from usas group websites – in general order of
usefulness, there are probably even more than this if you’d
look through online campus newspapers)
http://dolphin.upenn.edu/~psas/photos.html (Penn has some
high quality pictures)
http://web.qx.net/uknosweat/media/04042000-1.html (42
pictures to choose from)
http://www.asm.wisc.edu/masc.htm (a couple pictures)
Cool and simple Tulane sit-in picture -
http://tu.sas.home.att.net/sitinsign.jpg
http://www.uiowa.edu/~uisas/sitin.htm  (pictures from a
campus newspaper)



Resource List
United Students Against Sweatshops, 1413 K St. NW, 9th
Floor, Washington, DC 20005
phone: 202-NO-SWEAT
fax: 202-393-5886
http://www.usasnet.org
Listserv - usas-subscribe@egroups.com
WRC - http://www.workersrights.org
FLA - http://www.fairlabor.org
National Labor Committee - http://www.nlcnet.org


-Aaron Kreider is a SEACer at Notre Dame, and also a member
of the Progressive Student Alliance which is affiliated with
USAS. He is also writing a master’s thesis on USAS, and can
be reached at kreider.1@nd.edu-


Various Box Items


Tulane Sit-In Profile
Tulane is not known as a hotbed of student radicalism, but
just last spring Tulane caught the attention of the anti-
sweatshop movement with its powerful ten-day sit-in. It
started in the spring of 1999 when, without consulting the
students, the administration had Tulane join the FLA. So,
like many USAS groups, for the 1999/2000 year the students’
goal was to pullout of the FLA and join the WRC. To build
support Tulane SAS showed a video, sponsored a forum,
rallied, dropped a banner, and did street theater all while
they continued to meet with administrators.

In the spring of 2000, the administration agreed to join the
WRC, however SAS was upset that their university remained in
the FLA. So on March 29, SAS walked into their
administration building at noon. As the night grew late,
police threatened to close the building at midnight and
arrest the activists, but as the deadline approached over
two hundred people rallied outside and the police allowed
students to remain overnight, taking down their names.

For the next ten days, SAS lived in Gibson Hall. There were
as many as forty-five students at night, and as few as ten
during the day. Like the sit-in at many schools, students
were free to leave for class, work, or take a shower and
return refreshed. This flexibility helped to maximize
participation. The hall they were occupying grew to be both
chaotic and messy as a lot of food was donated and people
were living in a generally uninhabited space. Eventually, to
get the administration to negotiate with them, students
agreed to leave the building at midnight and slept in tents
outside, returning in the morning when the building
reopened. After ten days of media headlines and building
student support, SAS reached a compromise where Tulane
dropped out of both the FLA and the WRC. Amazingly the
administration agreed to put the issue to a student
referendum which was held this fall. Sit-in participants had
to pay a small university fine, but it was worth it as the
students solidified their victory by voting to join the WRC
and stay-off the FLA.

Another thing to put in a box: The current score: FLA 147
schools, WRC 62.
USAS contacts/campaigns at between 100 and 200 schools.


What is a Sweatshop? (This can be a separate box – or a
paragraph)
Sweatshops are rampant in the apparel industry both in the
US (especially in New York and Los Angeles) and foreign
countries. They are defined by one or more of the following
elements:
-no living wage (low, even unpaid, wages and/or arbitrary
fines taken out of wages)
-child labor
-no right to form unions (organizers are fired and/or
blacklisted)
-harassment of workers (verbal, sexual, physical, etc)
-unsafe working conditions (fumes, toxins, temperature,
safety equipment, exits that are locked)
-required overtime and long hours
-arbitrary firing
-violations of worker privacy