NATION
In February 2000, student groups at colleges across the nation mobilized in protest of the Fair Labor Association.
The FLA, charged with monitoring sweatshop conditions, was, in reality, made up of the companies that they were supposed to be watching.
After Penn students started urging the University join the Worker Rights Consortium, an organization they felt is better to monitor labor conditions, other schools began to follow suit.
Oberlin College, for example, joined the WRC, and discussions similar to those at Penn took place at Yale and Temple universities, as well as at the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Like Penn, Yale University students set a March 27 deadline for the New Haven school to pull out of the FLA and join the WRC.
Similarly, after a 70-person rally at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the school pulled out of the FLA.
PENN
On Feb. 16, 2000, then-Penn President Judith Rodin finally got her office back.
Rodin reached an agreement with an anti-sweatshop student group that had staged an nine-day sit-in and a hunger strike in College Hall to protest the University's involvement with the Fair Labor Association.
The FLA was an organization made up of companies, human rights groups and universities that was charged with monitoring factory conditions.
The Penn Students Against Sweatshops group, as it was known, was upset about the University's agreement with the FLA to oversee the production of Penn apparel because they believed the companies in the organization had too much control in monitoring themselves.
Following the protest, Penn withdrew from the FLA, becoming the first university to do so.
As students rolled up their sleeping bags in College Hall, PSAS Coordinator Miriam Joffe-Block said she was satisfied by the outcome.
"Our voice has been heard," she said.
