Pulp 24-7 Samples, 2003-2004

Tuesday, January 27
In high school band circles, there are dozens of jokes about flutists. "How do you get two flutes to play in unison? Shoot one." Or, "What do you get when you gather all the flutists in the band together? Too many flutists." Apparently flutes are just better when they're on their own. And they're best when played by someone like internationally renowned flutist Timothy Hutchins. Hutchins is currently the principal flute of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and before that, he was the principal flute of the Montreal Symphony, where he received international acclaim as a concerto soloist. He's even played Ibert's flute concerto at Carnegie Hall. Tonight he performs accompanied by his wife, pianist Janet Creaser Hutchins, as part of the Y Music Society series, and you can bet that when he's finished nobody will ask him, "How do you know if there's a flute player at your door? You don't, they can't find the right key and don't know when to come in." Ha ha. 8 p.m. $35. Jewish Community Center, Squirrel Hill. 412.392.4900

Monday, February 2
In 1968, shortly after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, elementary school teacher Jane Elliott performed a groundbreaking experiment. She asked her class of fourth-graders in all-white Riceville, Iowa what they thought about black people. They responded saying things like, "They're dirty," "They riot, they steal," and "You can't trust them, my dad says they better not try to move in next door to us." Determined to counter her students' prejudices, she divided the class into two groups and told the children that brown-eyed people were superior to blue-eyed people. She took away blue-eyed students' privileges and told the class that blue-eyed people were lazy and stupid. She didn't tell the students how to treat each other but within minutes she watched blue-eyed students become timid and brown-eyed students taunting the blue-eyed. That day Elliott learned that racism is taught, but it can also be untaught. Now a consultant who works with schools and corporations confronting discrimination in their organizations, Elliott presents a lecture entitled, Anatomy of a Prejudice. Free. 7 p.m. Winchester Thurston School, Shadyside. 412.578.7500

Friday, December 26
This year for Christmas, I asked Santa to please, please let the New York Nationals beat the Harlem Globetrotters. The New York Nationals are the Globetrotters' new opponent since the Washington Generals closed their camp in 1995, after half a decade of miserable defeats. Now I know that rooting against the Globetrotters is like rooting for the Grinch to steal Christmas or for Frosty to melt, but after getting downright embarrassed every day for years, even bad teams are in for a little Christmas magic- and maybe by that logic the Steelers will win their season closer, too. At tonight's game we'll see if the Nationals' holiday wish comes true, or, at the very least, enjoy the gift of watching some awe-inspiring basketball wizardry. 7 pm. Mellon Arena, Uptown. 412.323.1919

Monday, December 29
The cliche goes that one person's trash is another person's treasure. Whoever said that first apparently did not have a relative who worked at a thrift store. After spending some time with someone who brings home what they couldn't give away for free and tries to pass them off as gifts on unsuspecting family members, you get the sense that sometimes one person's junk really is another person's junk. The key is to make sure that it becomes another person's junk. You have the opportunity to do that with this year's unwanted Christmas presents at Zombo's Bad Gift Exchange Extravaganza. Bring them and get a dollar off the door and the opportunity to trade for someone else's thoughtless gift. Live music by the Legion of Incredibly Strange Superheroes, Mr. and Mr$. Funky, the Bowling Allies, and DJ Zombo really turns that bad gift into a treasure. 7:30 pm. $5. Club Cafe, South Side. 412.431.4950

Thursday, January 22
Terry is a struggling actor, living in Staten Island with two other struggling actors, Matt and Alex, who have been lovers for over four years. But lately Matt has been on tour in a musical and Alex has been cheating on him with Buck, a mall manager who got Alex his current gig as a ma mall Santa. Terry desperately wants to preserve the peace and stability he had before Matt left. Such is the basic premise behind the play, The Crumple Zone. Now if you're thinking, "Wait, a zany romantic comedy about roommates with nearly opposite personalities, set in a New York City borough?" or, "Hey, didn't that used to be a sitcom? I don't remember them being gay," you're not too far off. A theater critic for the New York Times says that the play "might have been written by [Neil] Simon if he were gay and 40 years younger." Cloven Hoof Productions kicks off the 2004 season with this Buddy Thomas comedy. Through January 31. The Penn Theater, Bloomfield. 412.761.3947

University Adopts Sweatshop Code of Conduct

Focus, Carnegie Mellon’s monthly newspaper for faculty and staff

On March 27, nearly 200 students attended “Starving for the Swoosh”, an interactive multimedia presentation on working conditions in factories overseas. The two presenters, Leslie Kretzu and Jim Keady, had spent the month of August 2000 living in a factory worker’s slum in Tangerang, Indonesia on $1.25 a day, the typical wage paid to a Nike worker in a shoe factory. In their presentation they talked about the workers they lived with who worked up to 15 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, sometimes working two 24 hour shifts in the same week to make quotas, abusive managers, dangerous working conditions, and pay that may or may not be enough to meet their basic needs. Keady, is a former soccer coach at St. John’s University who was forced to resign for refusing to wear Nike soccer equipment. He says that during a month living on $1.25 in Indonesia he lost over 25 pounds, and was unable to lift even a water bottle without his hands shaking violently. “I was literally starving, and my body was fighting it,” he says.

In the past five years sweatshops have become a major issue on college campuses. Students at the University of North Carolina, University of Michigan, Duke, Georgetown, and dozens of other universities around the country have staged protests and sit-ins in attempts to get university administrations to adopt Codes of Conduct- legal documents that regulate the behavior of the manufacturers of a schools licensed apparel. Recently, students and administrators at Carnegie Mellon have started dealing with the issue, and in April the President’s Council will make a decision about whether or not to approve Carnegie Mellon’s own Code of Conduct.

Work began on the Code of Conduct in Spring 2000 when administrators in the trademark licensing office, who had become aware of the anti-sweatshop movement on other campuses, formed a task force to draft a Code for Carnegie Mellon. The original task force included administration, two faculty representatives, two undergraduate and two graduate students. According to John Soluri, Assistant Professor of History and a member of the task force, they spent the next year reviewing Codes of Conduct from other schools, educating themselves on the issues and potential problems with implementing codes. He says, “It was quite a bit of revising and redrafting to arrive at a code that we were satisfied with.”

One of the biggest decisions the task force had to make was to choose a monitoring group. A Code of Conduct outlines very specifically the labor, environmental, and health practices that the manufacturers of a university’s apparel must follow. Monitoring groups travel to the factories where products are made to ensure that the manufacturers are adhering to the practices outlined in the Code of Conduct. At the time the task force was making their decision there were two major monitoring groups, the Fair Labor Association (FLA) and the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC). The FLA was established by the Clinton administration and was comprised of representatives from various labor and human rights groups as well as representatives from corporations in the apparel industry, like Nike. The FLA has drawn criticism from many people in the student movement who believe because the FLA has representatives from corporations on their board and, because they get part of their funding from corporations, that they are not a truly independent monitor. The WRC was formed by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), a coalition of student-based groups across the United States, as an alternative to the FLA. The WRC does not include corporate representatives, but some critics believe that it is too small and to be effective. In the end the task force decided to join both the FLA and the WRC. The task force finished a code in the spring of 2001, and it was sent to be reviewed by the administration and the university’s legal staff.

Also in the spring of 2001 two of the students from the task force, Shivdev Rao, a senior BHA student, and Brad McCombs a graduate MFA student, started a student group that was a member of USAS, called People for Worker’s Rights (PWR). “The student group was formed to bring more attention to the subject of the Code of Conduct and to deal with other issues relating to sweatshops,” says McCombs.

Last semester, student and faculty members of the task force who were waiting for the University to approve or reject the Code of Conduct began to feel that progress on the Code had stalled, and PWR began to take action.

According to Matt Toups begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting, co-leader of PWR, “One of the challenges this year has been to figure out exactly what was happening with the Code, and how to move progress on the Code from the outside.”

They wrote several letters to all levels of the administration but received little response. The group circulated a petition last semester asking the University to adopt the Code and collected over 250 signatures, and met with President Cohen and other members of the administration.

“Could it have been done faster- that’s not clear,” said Neal Binstock, assistant vice president for business services, who served as an administrative liaison to the task force. “Drafting a code is not a small or easy process.”

According to Binstock, the code had to go through a legal review, and changing each word of the code could potentially change the meaning of the document. He believes that the extra time was necessary. “We had to present the best possible code of conduct to represent Carnegie Mellon University.”

This semester the trademark licensing office sent a revised version of the Code back to the members of the original task force who are still at Carnegie Mellon. On March 18 the task force made some small changes to the Code, which will then be sent to the April 12 meeting of the President’s Council where it is expected to be approved. Once the Code is approved, language will be drafted into Carnegie Mellon licensing contracts insisting that the 95 licensees that make products with the Carnegie Mellon logo on it, as well as any new ones must endorse this code in the manufacturing of their products.

According to Binstock, “Our objective was to have a code of conduct acceptable to all of the people involved, and I believe that’s what we have achieved.”

Members of the task force feel that the move to adopt a code of conduct, although it has been a slow process, has been successful, although there is more work to be done once the code is adopted. Soluri says, “I think it would be misleading to say that students have driven the move to adopt a code, but I have not a doubt that students will have to drive the enforcement of the code by making fellow students, staff, and faculty aware that we need to buy our consumer good from companies that respect workers’ basic rights.”

Sidebar: Living on $1.25 Per Day

On March 27, nearly 200 students and faculty filled McConomy auditorium to attend “Starving for the Swoosh,” an interactive multimedia presentation on working conditions in factories overseas. The two presenters, Leslie Kretzu and Jim Keady, spent the month of August 2000 living in a factory worker’s slum in Tangerang, Indonesia, on $1.25 a day, the typical wage paid to a Nike worker in a shoe factory.

Kretzu and Keady talked about the workers they lived with who worked up to 15 hours a day, six or seven days a week, sometimes putting in two 24-hour shifts in the same week to make quotas. The presentation touched upon abusive managers, dangerous working conditions, and pay that many times is not enough to meet workers’ basic needs.

Keady is a former soccer coach at St. John’s University who was forced to resign for refusing to wear Nike soccer equipment. He says that during the month living on $1.25 a month in Indonesia he lost over 25 pounds, and was unable to lift even a water bottle without his hands shaking violently. “I was literally starving, and my body was fighting it,” he says.

The presentation was sponsored by People for Workers Rights (PWR), a student group that deals with sweatshops and other issues relating to workers’ rights. The group was formed in February of last year, originally as a way to bring more attention to the code of conduct, but the group has since begun to deal with other issues as well. This year the group has organized a “sweat free T-shirt” fundraiser, in which the group sold union made T-shirts which they silk-screened themselves. Also, they’ve been working with other groups at University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne and with local union members in a campaign to get the Pittsburgh Pirates to adopt a code of conduct for its merchandise, similar to the codes of conduct that many universities have begun to adopt.

This year the group has also been organizing its own trip to visit factories in Honduras next spring.

We want to see their culture,” says Matt Toups, a sophomore physics major and co-leader of PWR, “and to see first hand how our consumption affects their lives.”