Following Northwestern’s announcement that the director of the Fair Labor Association will visit campus, Northwestern Students Against Sweatshops members said Monday they plan to bring a prominent critic of the FLA in response.
NSAS members said they hope to have Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof. Dara O’Rourke speak a week after FLA Executive Director Sam Brown’s Nov. 2 speech in Annenberg Hall.
O’Rourke’s invitation was prompted by the university’s decision to remain a member of the FLA, an organization that certifies whether companies are free of sweatshop labor.
The student group sent a letter to University President Henry Bienen on Oct. 4 asking him to switch NU from the FLA to the Worker Rights Consortium, another certification organization. But the university denied the request Saturday in an e-mail sent by Senior Vice President for Business and Finance Eugene Sunshine.
In their letter to Bienen, NSAS members cited a study by O’Rourke that linked the FLA to shortcomings in sweatshop monitoring by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“By continuing membership in the FLA, we feel that Northwestern is condoning the use of sweatshop labor,” the student group’s letter said.
But Sunshine’s e-mail denied the claims, saying PwC is not officially affiliated with the FLA.
Sunshine’s letter said it was “simply wrong to assert, as Mr. O’Rourke does, that ‘PwC is poised to become one of the main auditors for, and most influential participants in,’ the FLA.”
Despite the university’s response, NSAS members stood by their letter to Bienen.
“We still believe there has been an informal relationship between PwC and the FLA,” the group said in a statement released Monday. The student group said it proposed inviting O’Rourke “to clarify the issues he brought up in his report against the FLA and PwC.”
But standing in the way of O’Rourke’s visit is a university contract deadline for student groups that already has passed, NSAS co-founder and meeting facilitator Neel Ahuja said.
While he said the group has enough money to pay O’Rourke’s speaking fee, Ahuja said NSAS would have had to file a request for the fee on Friday, a day before they learned about Brown’s visit from Sunshine’s letter.
Ahuja, a Weinberg junior, said his group needs the help of university administrators to grant an exemption from the deadline or to find another way to pay O’Rourke’s honorarium.
“We’ll do everything we can to get him here,” Ahuja said.
NSAS co-founder and Medill sophomore Pete Micek said the group saw the invitation to Brown as “a political statement, one that definitely warrants a response.”
Ahuja said it would be unfair for the university to turn down their request but was hopeful that administrators would be receptive.
In Friday’s Homecoming parade, NSAS promoted its anti-sweatshop and pro-WRC messages in a display that brought dropped jaws from the crowd lining Sheridan Road.
For the parade, three NSAS members stripped down to their boxer shorts and chained themselves to a shopping cart that carried Micek acting as Nike Chairman Phil Knight.
“This is grassroots Homecoming right here,” Micek said. “We’ll give a sense of realism to this night of revelry and have a good time doing it.”
Their display drew cheers from many parade-watchers — “a lot more support than we thought we’d get,” said Music junior Jeremy Thal, one of the boxer-clad group members.
But the crowd responses weren’t entirely positive, and the NSAS display brought some shouts of disagreement:
“Free trade!”
“Communists suck!”
And, of course: “Naked boys! Naked!”
“We weren’t preaching to the choir, that’s for sure,” Micek said.
Thal said he wanted to participate in the display “to take a second to stand up in public for what you believe in.”
