Ivy students protest against sweatshops

Ivy League officials are meeting today to discuss possible licensing rules. Following a wave of protests at college campuses across the country condemning the use of sweatshops to produce official school-logo apparel, students at a number of Ivy League universities yesterday held rallies in preparation for a meeting today among Ivy administrators to discuss the issue. Students at Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Yale universities held rallies encouraging administrators to adopt codes of conduct specifying rules of operation for factories which produce goods with collegiate logos. The different student groups are fighting for "living wages" for factory employees and humane working conditions. They also want the names and locations of the factories to be disclosed and monitored by human rights groups. The factories in question are all located in developing nations. Brown University students are planning a protest for today, when a task force of licensing officials from most of the Ivy League schools is scheduled to meet in New York City to develop guidelines for their products. Penn officials were unable to confirm yesterday whether or not the University will be sending a representative to the conference today. Despite the widespread protesting, there is nothing similar being planned for Penn, according to Progressive Activist Network member Miriam Joffe-Block. The College junior said she is "really excited about the events at other schools" and that she is looking forward to bringing the University community "into the loop of action" in the future. There is no anti-sweatshop group at the University, she said, and future work involving the issue will be an "ad hoc collaborative effort." Earlier this year, highly publicized student protests took place at Duke and Georgetown universities and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In all three, dozens of students held sit-ins in the offices of their presidents to force administrators to confront the issue. Students at those schools -- which license their products through the Collegiate Licensing Company -- were able to reach agreements with university administrators. According to Brown spokesperson Mark Nickel, the Ivy League conference today "is not a decision-making body," but rather will make recommendations to administrators of those schools represented for independent codes of conduct. It was unclear last night how many schools would be attending. According to Cornell junior and anti-sweatshop group leader Claire Urban, officials from the Ithaca, N.Y., school will not attend. Urban said that Cornell licenses its products through the CLC, which has its own code of conduct. Leaders of student anti-sweatshop groups at a number of schools said that university administrators seemed inclined to create a universal Ivy code of conduct instead of developing independent codes. Yale senior Jessica Champagne, co-coordinator of the New Haven, Conn., school's chapter of Students Against Sweatshops, said that her group has a "pretty amicable relationship with administrators" but was concerned that the Ivy group would sign onto a "weak" code. About 30 Yale students held a "knit-in" yesterday, knitting outside of the university's main administration building and handing out leaflets for about an hour and a half, she said. Among the codes being considered by the Ivy schools is the Apparel Industry Partnership code, created by a White House task force of clothing producers and human rights groups. But Champagne said the AIP code was "a way to cover up wrongdoing more than a way to change things." At Princeton, a group of about 300 students held a rally at which a half-dozen speakers discussed sweatshop working conditions and student responsibilities, according to Princeton junior David Tannenbaum, a leader of Students for Progressive Education and Action. "Princeton has no political activist culture at all," Tannenbaum said, noting that this was the first rally that he could recall taking place in the time he has been a student there. At the rally, about 250 people signed letters to Princeton President Harold Shapiro, and 150 marched to the administration building to deliver the letters, Tannenbaum said. The ralliers were met on the building's steps by Princeton's vice president of public affairs, who said the demands sounded reasonable. "We were very happy with that verbal commitment," Tannenbaum said. At Harvard, senior Daniel Hennefeld of the Progressive Student Labor Movement said that about 80 students marched through the university's campus to the president's office where they presented a letter containing "essential principles" of a code of conduct. While the group has "made a lot of progress," he said, Harvard is "not there yet" in creating an acceptable policy.