Responding to a push by Northwestern Students Against Sweatshops that the university switch its certification system of apparel companies, Senior Vice President for Business and Finance Eugene Sunshine said he will send a letter to the group today denying the request.

The university, however, will continue to evaluate both the Fair Labor Association, of which NU is a member, and the Worker Rights Consortium, which the student group supports, Sunshine said.

In an Oct. 4 letter to University President Henry Bienen, NSAS members cited a report by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof. Dara O’Rourke that “raises serious questions about the effectiveness of PricewaterhouseCoopers” in monitoring apparel factories.

The report says the company is “poised to become one of the main auditors for, and most influential participants in, the Fair Labor Association.”

This possibility disturbed NSAS members because, according to the letter, the MIT study found that the company “had a pro-management bias and failed to identify puppet unions, forced overtime, carcinogens and other labor rights violations.”

“By continuing membership in the FLA, we feel that Northwestern is condoning the use of sweatshop labor,” the letter says.

On Thursday, Sunshine defended the FLA, saying PricewaterhouseCoopers has not influenced the association. “PwC has not applied to be an accredited monitor in the FLA program,” he said. “Moreover, PwC nor any other firm has conducted monitoring to the comprehensive standard the FLA has developed.”

Sunshine said that in the future PwC likely will apply to be an accredited monitor, and the FLA then will evaluate it. O’Rourke’s report “would obviously be taken into account,” he said.

The FLA has told NU that it has “anticipated the problems, and the FLA standards are clear about how to avoid them,” Sunshine said.

He also said FLA Executive Director Sam Brown will speak at NU in November, a talk he said will be “open to anybody interested on this whole topic.”

Weinberg junior Neel Ahuja, president of NSAS, said Thursday he would not fully respond to Sunshine’s comments until he had received the letter and discussed it with other members of his organization, but said he hoped the university would seriously consider the other points raised in his group’s letter and O’Rourke’s study.

The NSAS letter to Bienen read in part:

“The influence of for-profit monitoring firms, the failure to mandate wages that meet workers’ needs, and the method of giving companies FLA certification based on a small percentage of factory visits all indicate the likelihood that FLA will give its stamp of approval to companies that operate sweatshops.”

Ahuja said the FLA examines 15 percent of apparel companies’ factories before the companies are accredited by the FLA and are allowed to put a tag stating FLA’s approval on their clothing. But the percentage is too low to adequately monitor the companies, he said.

Regarding worker pay, Ahuja said the WRC’s requirement of a “living wage,” a wage taking into account housing, food and other necessities, makes the WRC preferable over the FLA, which he said has no wage plan.

Ahuja said he and other NSAS members met with university administrators and the Board of Trustees in Spring Quarter to advocate dual membership in the WRC and FLA, a position the group held until O’Rourke released his report in September.

NSAS and Faculty Against Sweatshops, a group of more than 60 NU faculty members, have been doing research on both certification groups since the spring and will release a report of their findings later this quarter, Ahuja said.

Despite turning down a switch to the WRC, Sunshine said NU “continues to assess” both groups and would still consider future membership in the WRC.

Although Ahuja said he appreciated the administrators’ openness, he said their lack of support for the WRC was “a little frustrating.”

“I don’t know how interested they are in the WRC,” he said.

Ahuja said he was disappointed his group had not been consulted before FLA’s Brown was invited but hoped the university would still be open to adding another speaker.

“I really hope they bring a speaker to talk to us about the WRC,” he said. “There needs to be discussion, and the WRC needs to be included in that.”

Brown will speak 7 to 8:30 p.m. on Nov. 2 in Annenberg Hall, Sunshine said.

Although Ahuja said the WRC currently is a smaller organization than the FLA — a point Sunshine said was among many that influenced the university’s decision to remain with the FLA — the NSAS leader maintained that a switch to the WRC would be a good move for the university and said both groups have a great deal of growth and development ahead of them.

“It’s going to take each of them several years before they’re up to capacity in terms of having a network established and having people out in the field talking to workers,” Ahuja said.