Harvard Joins Sweatshop Oversight Group

In order to better ensure that apparel bearing the Harvard name is produced under quality working conditions, the University will affiliate itself with the Fair Labor Association (FLA), a new organization planning to monitor clothing factories around the world, a University official said yesterday.

Seventeen other colleges and universities, including all the Ivy League schools, have also indicated their intentions to affiliate with the FLA, which was created in November by the Apparel Industry Partnership (AIP), a national coalition of groups working against sweatshops.

The FLA will not be fully operational until early 2000.

The announcement comes one week after the University said it would institute a "full disclosure" policy regarding the location of factories producing Harvard licensed apparel.

Students in the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) have been agitating for the University to take measures against sweatshop labor for months. Last Tuesday, anti-sweatshop protesters joined in a 250-person campus rally outside University Hall with campus activists for two other causes.

According to University Attorney Allan M. Ryan Jr., recent steps against sweatshops were less a response to student protests than the result of private discussions held with students over the past several months.

Ryan said this move was only the first step in the University's commitment to addressing the sweatshop issue.

"This may or may not prove to be an effective answer...but it didn't seem to do any harm to join and support it," Ryan said.

PSLM member Daniel M. Hennefeld '99 said he disapproved of Harvard's decision to affiliate with the FLA, and was surprised by the University's willingness to associate itself with the AIP.

"From what I understood, Harvard had a lot of the same concerns about the AIP that we do," Hennefeld said.

The AIP was initiated last year when the White House brought together representatives from various industries, human rights groups, consumer advocate organizations and other groups to develop an international labor standard.

According to Hennefeld, the FLA gives individual manufacturers too much control over the monitoring process and fails to include demands for a living wage.

Hennefeld also said the FLA limits access to information it collects about companies, which he said could potentially cut off public pressure and involvement.

Ryan said that the University shares some of PSLM's concerns.

"We're certainly not putting all our eggs in FLA's basket--we need to do more than FLA offers," he said. "We are just signing our name to a pledge that we hope works out."

Ryan said this is only one of many options the University will pursue. Harvard may form its own monitoring group in the future, he said.

"Harvard is hoping to launch an initiative composed of Harvard and perhaps some other schools that will allow us direct access to information about sweatshop conditions," he said.

According to a letter to members of the American Council on Education (ACE) yesterday by council president Stanley O. Ikenberry, colleges and universities only recently became able to join the FLA.

Ikenberry wrote in the letter that many member institutions of the ACE had expressed concerns about the problem of sweatshop labor in factories producing college insignia apparel. He suggested they might find their solution by affiliating with the FLA.

"The FLA has adopted a code of conduct and, through its professional staff, will administer a carefully prescribed monitoring process to assess compliance of companies with these standards," he wrote.

Hennefeld said he believed that the AIP had decided to include colleges and universities in order to improve its national image.

"The AIP has gotten a lot of bad press recently and rightfully so," he said. "I think it's trying to re-legitimize itself by involving universities, and possibly trying to take the wind out of the sails of student movements."

But Robert K. Durkee, vice president for public affairs at Princeton University and a member of an AIP task force that pushed for the inclusion of colleges and universities, said much of the motivation for including academic institutions came from the schools themselves.

"A lot of colleges and universities have been looking for some way to hold their licensees to a certain standard...and the FLA provides a way to do that," he said.

Michael H. Posner, the executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, one of the non-governmental organizations instrumental in the formation of the FLA, said the association will make several institutional changes in response to the inclusion of colleges and universities.

The FLA will add a college and university representative to its board, a full time college and university staff position and will create an advisory council with members from each affiliated school, Posner said.