Students Protest Labor Conditions at Guess?

The Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM), a group affiliated with the Phillips Brooks House Association, protested human rights abuses by the designer jeans company Guess? in front of the Science Center yesterday.

PSLM was participating in a nation-wide anti-sweatshop campaign that is supported by the band Rage Against Machines and the Union of Needle-trades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).

PSLM also participated in the campaign last year, and over 200 colleges nationwide are currently involved, said UNITE organizer Katie Shaller.

To publicize their message, the campaign has taken out advertisements in a variety of publications, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Crimson.

PSLM members say they are trying to convince University administrators to sign a code of conduct against buying Harvard paraphernalia made in sweatshops and to fund an independent group to monitor these factories.

PSLM said it would also like other universities and colleges to sign a similar code of conduct.

Last spring, Duke University did.

Daniel R. Morgan '99, a PSLM member, said Harvard continues to purchase clothing from companies suspected of using sweatshops because it believes it cannot make a big enough impact by itself.

Therefore, PSLM is trying to create a coalition with 35 other colleges and universities with similar anti-sweatshop student organizations.

The group believes that if all 35 schools sign the code of conduct, their combined purchasing power will make the boycott effective.

Besides encouraging colleges to support the anti-sweatshop campaign, PSLM said it hopes individual Harvard students will refrain from purchasing Guess clothing.

"We are focusing on Guess partly because we want people to make that connection between [its] hip, young image and the image of kids working in factories under terrible conditions," said Daniel M. Hennefeld '99, a PSLM member.

"Another reason we focus on Guess is because it had been caught twice with notable violations of labor standards," Morgan said.

The students who walked by the Science Center yesterday were generally receptive to PSLM's message.

"Anti-sweatshop campaigns are pretty uncontroversial," said Rita F. Lin '00.

But some students said they remained wary. "In principle, I agree with using boycotts for political reason," said Nisha S. Agarwal '00. "Then again, I don't like people trying to impose their ideas on me."