February 21, 2008 issue
United Students Against Sweatshops Pressure ASU Administration
Story by Sam Calhoun
Forty-one American universities have signed an agreement with the United Students Against Sweatshops, and a local chapter of the organization is attempting to make ASU the 42nd.
United Students Against Sweatshops is a student organization with chapters at more than 200 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. In April 2000, United Students Against Sweatshops founded the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent monitoring organization that investigates labor conditions in factories that produce collegiate apparel all over the world.
ASU’s chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops started in September 2006 and today has 30 core members with roughly 500 “peripheral members,” according to United Students Against Sweatshops member and ASU student Billy Schweig.
The group maintains that students and community members should have control over the conditions under which their clothes are manufactured.
Universities license their logo to clothing manufacturers, such as Nike, who then subcontract orders to other companies that further subcontract work to thousands of different factories. The group considers the licensing stage the most efficient way to control production.
At ASU, the group is asking that Chancellor Ken Peacock make a conditional agreement to adopt the United Students Against Sweatshops program once it becomes legal. The program is undergoing a government investigation to make sure it doesn’t violate any antitrust laws, according to Schweig.
United Students Against Sweatshops is hoping that the 41 universities and colleges that have already signed on will bring bargaining power to the program.
Once the program is implemented, sweatshop workers will not be forced out of work but will be paid a higher wage that comes from a price increase on the logo apparel. The Workers Rights Consortium will regulate the transfer of money and make sure it gets in the right hands.
So far, ASU has not adopted the program or agreed to sign the conditional agreement.
“We’ve been in nonstop negotiations [with the ASU administration] for 1.5 years. We hardly go to class,” said Schweig. “The reason we’ve resorted to pressure tactics is because we have encountered a lot of different stalling tactics from ASU. That’s why we are using our national base [of supporters] to show how much power we have.”
On Valentine’s Day, United Students Against Sweatshops supporters wrote 1,000 valentines detailing their concern over ASU’s failure to act on the agreement. United Students Against Sweatshops at ASU also organized an international phone bomb—more than 30,000 students, friends, faculty and NGO workers called the same phone number during the same period of the day—on Valentine’s Day for Chancellor Peacock’s office and private residence, tying up the phone lines for hours. On Valentine’s Day, Chancellor Peacock talked to the activists and said he would reopen the dialogue on the issue.
On March 19, the United Students Against Sweatshops at ASU will host a rally outside the ASU administration building.
For more information, click to www.studentsagainstsweatshops.org or call Schweig at 901-489-1701.
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