PSAS members still waiting

Even though they staged the biggest student protest in recent Penn memory -- with a nine-day sit-in at Judith Rodin's office -- the members of Penn Students Against Sweatshops are still not satisfied. Although nearly seven months have gone by since the protest ended in February, Penn has still not joined a manufacturing monitor. More specifically, it has not joined the PSAS monitor of choice, the Worker Rights Consortium. "We are still very much adamant that Penn have a monitoring organization," said Annie Wadsworth, a PSAS member and College sophomore. "We want them to join the WRC." As long as the University remains without a monitoring group, members of PSAS say it will be virtually impossible to supervise the production of Penn-logo merchandise. And according to members of the Penn committee on sweatshop labor, the issue may remain unresolved for months. Last year, PSAS urged Penn to resign from the Fair Labor Association, which it did after the February sit-in. The group pushed the University to join the WRC, which its proponents say is a less biased and more socially effective organization than the FLA, since the latter group has corporations such as Nike in its membership group. Last spring, the Ad Hoc Committee on Sweatshop Labor -- which has since been replaced by the Committee on Manufacturer Responsibility -- advised Rodin not to join either group and the situation has not changed since. Over the summer, relatively little progress was made in reaching a solution to this pressing campus issue. Penn still needs to decide if it wants to join one, both or neither of the organizations. A major reason the University did not join either organization last year was because of a concern over the lack of collegiate representation on the boards of both the FLA and the WRC. However, over the last few months, the WRC has changed the make-up of its board of directors and now two-thirds of the spots are set aside for university- and college-related representatives. "We feel that the WRC has done a lot of the things the University asked," PSAS member and College junior Matt Grove said. "It has gone in the right direction." Wadsworth added that if progress isn't made soon, in any direction, PSAS "definitely won't keep quiet," though the group won't resort to "drastic action." The Committee on Manufacturer Responsibility will play an important role in forming whatever decision Rodin makes. The committee, composed of nine voting faculty and student members, met three times over the summer, but is still far from ready to make any kind of recommendation. Not all of the members could attend the summer meetings, which were largely spent bringing members up to date on all the issues and any developments within the FLA or WRC. Rodin has repeatedly said the sweatshop issue is of great importance to her. "The issue of ensuring safer and healthier working conditions... remains a clear priority," she said in an e-mail statement yesterday. Despite her repeated reassurances, however, progress looks as if it will be slow in coming. Committee Chairman Greg Possehl, the chairman of the Anthropology Department, said he did not think the committee would offer Rodin its recommendation until next spring. "The committee is still in a position of learning about [the FLA and the WRC]," he said. "And these organizations are still changing because they're so young." He explained that the committee would have to meet at least twice this semester and that members hoped to schedule the first meeting during the last week of September. At the first meeting, Possehl predicted that the committee would get a much better sense of when it would be able to make a recommendation. Still, PSAS remains impatient. Grove said that if Penn does not join either monitoring organization, it will not have the ability to enforce the Code of Workplace Conduct for Penn Apparel Licenses that the Ad Hoc Committee drew up last spring.