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.”
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