Ivy officials discuss sweatshop labor use

Penn was the only school absent from the group, which met to talk about a possible code of conduct. With debates over sweatshop labor raging at campuses across the country, representatives from seven of the eight Ivy League schools -- with Penn the only absentee -- met in New York City yesterday to discuss possible guidelines for preventing university-licensed apparel from being produced at sweatshops. Following highly-publicized sit-ins at Georgetown and Duke universities and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, students at five Ivy League schools have held anti-sweatshop rallies and protests over the past two days demanding fair treatment for workers in the factories where university apparel is made and monitoring of the facilities by human rights groups. At yesterday's conference, Ivy administrators discussed the use of sweatshop labor in developing countries to produce official school apparel, according to Jeff Orleans, the executive director of the Council of Ivy Group Presidents. Penn Vice President and General Counsel Peter Erichsen said the University's absence at the conference should not be taken as a sign of disinterest in the sweatshop issue. "It wasn't so much that we decided not to" attend the conference, Erichsen said. "The discussions have been progressing and the Ivy League has been advising us on what their thinking was on the subject." Erichsen said that University does not have its own policy on licensing its name to companies that may use sweatshop labor. Formulating a group policy -- led by either several schools or by the apparel industry itself -- would be more effective, he said. The group of licensing directors, lawyers and public relations officials met for about seven hours yesterday, Orleans said, "to see what kind of advice we should give to the Ivy presidents." They discussed both what types of rules should be included in a code of conduct and rule enforcement, he said. Orleans declined to reveal any specific ideas that the group formulated. He stressed, though, that the informal group is only a recommending body designed to give the Ivy presidents "some sense of the issues," and that the individual universities will establish their own codes based on the group's conclusions. Student leaders of anti-sweatshop campaigns at a number of Ivy schools have said they were concerned that the Ivy task force would recommend adopting a weak code of conduct. Orleans said that the Ivy group has been considering the students' concerns in its discussions. "There's been continuous and extensive student contact" at all schools where it was requested, he said, noting that students from four Ivy universities made presentations at the group's January meeting. Orleans said the Ivy group is focusing its efforts on how to enforce a code of conduct, rather than debating what to include in it, since most codes of conduct in the apparel industry have begun to "look very similar." The rallies and sit-ins have had results at a number of institutions. On Tuesday, Brown President Gordon Gee promised that his school will disclose the names and locations of factories where Brown products are made within one year, following similar decisions at Georgetown and Duke. And after a rally on Tuesday at Princeton University, administrators said the students' demands sounded reasonable.