Northwestern Students Against Sweatshops on Monday called on NU to end its affiliation with the Fair Labor Association and join the rival Workers Rights Consortium.
In a 43-page report drawing on 10 months of research, NSAS activists outlined their arguments for abandoning the FLA, which they say is hopelessly hampered by ties to the corporations it monitors.
The report reiterates NSAS’s long-standing position that NU should join the WRC, which NSAS says is more progressive and independent.
Both the FLA and the WRC work to improve sweatshop conditions in factories around the world that produce university apparel, but with different monitoring procedures and levels of corporate involvement.
“I applaud the students on their thoughtfulness on this issue,” said Eugene Sunshine, senior vice president for business and finance. “(The report) obviously reflects a lot of research and analysis.”
Sunshine said NU remains committed to the FLA but is open to someday joining the WRC.
The report argues that the FLA, which NU joined in 1999 as a founding member, relies too heavily on corporate cooperation.
“Corporate involvement in organization governance or in the process of independent monitoring ? diminishes the credibility of the organization and comes at the expense of independent control of the process,” the report states.
Corporate representatives hold six of the 14 seats on the FLA’s governing board. The remaining seats are held by six non-governmental organizations, one representative of the 149 member universities and a board chairman.
The WRC has no corporate representatives on its governing board. But Sunshine said corporate cooperation is an asset rather than a liability.
“You will never engender change if corporations are not committed,” he said.
The report also argues that the FLA harms workers by not requiring a “living wage.”
The FLA requires corporations to pay employees the prevailing industry wage or the local minimum wage, whichever is higher. The WRC mandates a living wage, roughly defined as the wage necessary for a family to provide for its basic needs.
Members of the NU Board of Trustees voiced concerns about the living wage when they met with NSAS members in June, prompting students to devote a major section of the report to the topic.
“The report acknowledges that more study is necessary before the definition and implementation of the living wage can be understood,” said NSAS co-founder Peter Micek.
But Sunshine said the living wage issue remains a sticking point with administrators.
“We’re not comfortable signing on with something so vague and undefined,” he said.
Grace Tsiang, a University of Chicago labor economist, said trying to impose American labor and environmental standards on developing nations is unrealistic.
Tsiang said market forces compel corporations to pay locally competitive wages, no matter how measly those wages seem to Americans, and that labor conditions will improve as local economies develop.
“It would be difficult to impose (American) standards on the firms that can go other places, resulting in unemployment for all those workers,” she said.
Sunshine said he would forward the report to NU trustees and remain open to new approaches.
