WRC members gather for first official meeting

The labor monitoring organization now has 44 members schools. The Worker Rights Consortium held its official founding conference on Friday in New York, formally bringing into existence an organization that has been the subject of tremendous controversy at colleges and universities across the country. The meeting at Judson Memorial Church, near New York University's campus, brought together students and administrators from most of the WRC's 44 member colleges. Nearly all of those schools have joined in the past six weeks, which has seen a wave of protests urging colleges and universities to join the WRC. Penn has not joined the WRC, but withdrew its membership from a rival anti-sweatshop organization -- the Fair Labor Association -- in February after a nine-day sit-in by Penn Students Against Sweatshops, which opposes the FLA. Penn was the first school in the country to leave the FLA. Penn's Ad Hoc Committee on Sweatshop Labor, which is advising University President Judith Rodin on which of the two groups Penn should join, recommended two weeks ago that Rodin continue to withhold membership from both until they meet demands for increased representation for colleges and universities on their governing boards. At this point, nine of the 12 seats on the WRC's board -- including three student seats and six WRC Advisory Council seats -- have been filled. The three remaining seats will be held by representatives of member schools' administrations and will be decided on at a meeting of administrators in Chicago later this month. The FLA currently allocates only one of the 13 seats on its board to universities, with six seats going to apparel companies and six to human rights groups. According to WRC Coordinator Maria Roeper, Friday's four-hour meeting -- which was closed to the public and the media -- saw students, administrators and human rights experts involved with the WRC "airing concerns and having discussions and making sure that we're all at the same place." "People were nervous coming into this meeting," Roeper noted, saying that administrators and students from some schools came to the meeting with adversarial feelings after student-led protests on many campuses forced schools to join the WRC. At the conference, the WRC Advisory Council suggested the creation of four working groups of students and administrators to look at such issues as how factory information will be made public and how the WRC will work with human rights groups in developing countries to evaluate factory conditions. When several administrators at the meeting expressed concerns about the representation of universities on the WRC governing board, Roeper said, a decision was made to add a fifth working group to look at possible restructuring plans. The student members of the governing board -- elected nationally by USAS chapters at both WRC-member and non-member schools -- are Brown University student David Moore, University of Michigan student Peter Friedman and Purdue University graduate student Marikah Mancini. Brown and Michigan are WRC members, but Purdue is not. "The sense I got at the founding conference was one of collaboration" between students and administrators, Moore, a Brown junior, said yesterday, calling the decision to add the fifth working group on governing-board representation "phenomenally responsive." The six Advisory Board representatives include a Columbia University Law School professor, an officer of the AFL-CIO, a University of California labor policy specialist and a member of Congress. The FLA currently has more than 130 member schools, while the WRC has increased its membership in recent weeks to 44 schools, including the University of California system, which joined last week. Some schools have switched their membership from the FLA to the WRC, but others have retained membership in both groups. The WRC governing board is expected to hold its first regular meeting in June, when it may hear reports from several of the working groups.

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