Word: sweatshop
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...time when campus protests are more likely to involve bans on booze than the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia, one cause seems to have galvanized students as nothing else in more than a decade. In the past three months the issue of sweatshop labor has sparked student sit-ins at Duke, Georgetown and the University of Wisconsin. Backed by unions and human-rights groups, students on more than 50 other campuses from Harvard to Holy Cross are circulating petitions, picketing college bookstores and launching websites calling for "sweat-free" clothing. At Yale, students held a "knit-in," doing needlework...
...many in the education community are questioning whether the wave of anti-sweatshop protest is an indigenous resurgence of campus activism or the handiwork of a powerful outside agitator--organized labor. Since he took over the AFL-CIO in 1995, John Sweeney has brought labor's cause to campus, pouring more than $3 million into internships and outreach programs meant to interest students in careers as union activists. Indeed, it was summer stints at unions that first alerted Romer-Friedman and other students to the sweatshop issue...
There is no doubt that UNITE has had a hand in generating student awareness of the issue. Starting in 1997, UNITE sleuths began tipping off students to the locations of alleged sweatshop factories. Since then, UNITE spokeswoman Jo-Ann Mort says, it has merely "given [the students] moral support." Lately that support has included participating in--and paying for--regular conference calls among student leaders on different campuses and coaching students over the phone during sit-ins. In February the union sent two sweatshop workers on a five-campus tour to spur greater interest in the cause. Though many student...
...manipulating students but motivating them," says the AFL-CIO's Sweeney. Either way, the outreach program has been a tactical masterstroke. "At this moment the sweatshop protest is definitely being carried on the backs of university students," says Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee, one of several human-rights groups that are also counseling the students. "If a hundred students hold a protest, they get a page in the New York Times. If a hundred union people did that, they'd be locked...
Still, the protesters have maintained the relatively polite demeanor of a movement that is, after all, an extracurricular activity. Rodolfo Palma-Lulion, an anti-sweatshop activist at the University of Michigan, says of last month's sit-in: "The point was to show that students are not apathetic, that we care deeply about this issue, then go back to class...