Students To Lobby For Sweatshop Monitoring

Harvard Students Against Sweatshops (HSAS) will meet with University officials Monday to urge Harvard to join what they argue is a more effective sweatshop monitoring organization.

The meeting is only the latest effort in a four year old campaign to convince Harvard to join the Workers’ Rights Consortium, a body charged with regulating working conditions in factories that manufacture collegiate merchandise, including products bearing the Harvard logo.

Harvard is a founding member of the Fair Labor association, a competing watchdog group that HSAS claims is not independent enough from the industries it regulates.

“Membership in the FLA is insufficient and membership in the WRC is the logical next step,” said HSAS member Emma S. Mackinnon ’05, who is also a Crimson editor.

Mackinnon and others from the group will argue their case with the University’s top lawyer, General Counsel Robert W. Iuliano, Monday.

But as the group is quick to point out, this is hardly their first meeting with University administration over the issue.

The group sent briefs to former General Counsel Anne Taylor and University President Lawrence H. Summers during his first year in office, and met with officials again last spring.

Mackinnon said the group was asked to resubmit materials this fall, and said the University was engaged in stalling tactics.

“We kept being promised decisions that never happened. There’s no particular argument against [membership in the WRC]—we keep being told that Summers needs more time to think,” Mackinnon said. “We’ve gone through all the steps they’ve required and it seems that Iuliano having to consider it as well is another step tacked on to the end.”

Mackinnon said that Taylor endorsed the HSAS position just before she left her post.

Iuliano declined comment yesterday.

Taylor said she does not recall the specific content of her memo. She added that as of a year ago there was not enough information available to make a policy decision.

“At the time there were concerns about the WRC being so new, it didn’t have any bylaws, but I think a lot of those problems were resolved in a positive way,” Taylor said. “There was never a formal response [to the memo], but it was talked about and looked at carefully...There was never any hostility towards the idea, or any kind of rejection.”

Harvard helped to found the FLA in 1996 with the aim of alleviating the problem of inhumane working conditions in factories producing collegiate logo merchandise. The Association works with the companies and major clothing retailers involved in the production and sale of merhcandise bearing member institutions’ logos.

Since its creation, however, the FLA has been repeatedly criticized by labor experts because of the influential position its 13 member companies, including Nike, Reebok and Polo Ralph Lauren, hold within the organization.

Originally, the FLA’s board included six industry representatives, six NGO/labor representatives, and a mutually agreed-upon chair to which a single additional voting seat was added for a college/university representative to voice the concerns of the 176 colleges and universities that are affiliated.

Though the original intention was to work with companies in a non-accusatory manner, independent labor experts have argued that this setup has prevented the FLA from achieving its goals.

In light of these issues, HSAS has argued that the FLA alone is not sufficient and that Harvard should also join the WRC, which is completely independent of the manufacturers.

“We’ve heard pretty compelling arguments from even the head of the FLA that it can’t supply monitoring both internally and externally in a reliable manner by itself, whereas the WRC is able to leverage a lot of power over companies quickly,” Mackinnon said.

Mackinnon asserted that Harvard’s membership in the WRC would not be mutually exclusive with its FLA affiliation, and that in recent years the FLA and WRC have worked jointly on a number of occasions.

“It’s pretty clear that the FLA can’t do it alone, but the two organizations have had successes in the past by combining their different approaches,” she said.

And representatives from both organizations said that joint membership does not represent a conflict.

“We certainly don’t discourage membership in both organizations, and have even encouraged it,” said Kathy Stevens, the FLA’s university liason. “In my opinion, universities should make their own decisions but there is certainly nothing wrong with membership in both,” said Kathy Stevens, the FLA’s university liaison.

Scott Nova, the director of WRC said that the two organizations are “fully compatible,” with over 75 colleges and universities currently holding joint membership.

“In every case that a university or college has been a member of both organizations it has worked out fine. [The WRC and the FLA] have different approaches but the most effective work has been done through a collaboration of both,” he said.