STAFF EDITORIAL: No solution on sweatshops

In its final recommendation to the president's office last week, the committee said that Penn should join neither the Fair Labor Association or the rival Worker Rights Consortium. At best, this proposal is a cop-out on the part of committee members; at worst, it represents a complete dereliction of duty. Until a few months ago, Penn was a member of the FLA, which has the support of corporate interests and more than 100 schools. Members of Penn Students Against Sweatshops want the University to join the WRC, which has the backing of labor and human rights groups and a rapidly growing number of colleges. The committee did well to devise a fair code of conduct for the manufacturers of clothing items that bear the University's insignia. But without a monitoring organization to actually enforce its provisions, the code is hardly worth the paper on which it's printed. The sweatshop committee declined to endorse either the FLA or the WRC because of its unrealistic demands for increased university representation on the organizations' governing boards. But the majority of the task force evidently fails to realize that Penn has little leverage in this regard, and can only effect organizational change from the inside. We have long endorsed that Penn work first with the WRC, which grants a full quarter of its seats to school administrators and would more fully enforce Penn's code of conduct. But the point here is that Penn has to join some organization if factory conditions are ever going to be monitored. We encourage President Rodin to reject the committee's ill-considered recommendation and at the very least enlist Penn in one or both of these organizations on a provisional basis.