Panel gathers at Penn to discuss sweatshops

Corporate responsibility in monitoring workers' rights was once again a hot topic at Penn on Friday. Nearly 50 people gathered in Houston Hall's Hall of Flags for a conference on "Corporate Social Responsibility and Sweatshops." The audience of students, faculty and members of the Philadelphia community listened to the views of speakers representing the different sides of the sweatshops issue. Two question-and-answer panels were also held, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, in which audience members could interact with the speakers. "It's good business to be socially responsible," International Labor Organization representative Nikolai Rogovsky said at the start of the day-long conference. Rogovsky, who is the ILO's principal officer of the Voluntary Private Initiatives Program in Geneva, Switzerland, pointed out that the focus of his work is not on the quality of corporate codes of conduct but on what those codes mean for multinationals and the supply chain. "No worker should be treated like a slave," said Chie Abad, a former sweatshop worker on the island of Saipan, a United States possession. Abad, a campaign organizer at the non-profit Global Exchange, used a hidden camera for the television program 20/20 to record some of the abuses taking place in her sweatshop. Abad pointed out that the mostly male supervisors will at times manipulate the largely female staff so they can keep their labor contracts. "What the boss will ask is for sex in exchange for the contract," Abad said. Corporations were also represented at the conference. "We have a culture that encourages and supports ethical business," Phillips-Van Heusen Vice President of Human Rights Programs Marcela Manubens said. Bruce Raynor, international secretary-treasurer and vice president of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, criticized corporations for deceiving the public about their labor practices. "They try to use smoke and mirrors to burnish their image," Raynor said. He also criticized the Fair Labor Association, one of several organizations that monitors factory working conditions. "The FLA was another ruse to protect the companies from the pressure of the public," Raynor said. Penn joined the FLA and the newly-formed Worker Rights Consortium last December. The University had withdrawn from the FLA last February following a nine-day student sit-in at College Hall, where Penn Students Against Sweatshops were demanding that the University pull out of the FLA and join the WRC. Brian Kelly, who participated in the PSAS sit-in, expressed his ongoing disapproval at the University's membership in the FLA. "I feel like it's illegitimate for us to be in the FLA," the Wharton junior said at the conference. Gregory Possehl, the chairman of Penn's Committee on Manufacturers' Responsibility, said that in November, the committee sent letters to the companies who manufacture Penn-logo apparel to help them evaluate whether they are adequately protecting workers' rights. "Our next task is to read and evaluate those letters and to assure ourselves that our vendors are actually responding to the questions that we asked them, and that their responses actually are adequate in terms of their compliance," Possehl said "I'm quite confident that we'll have this behind us before classes end," he added.

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