The Logical Choice

The Harvard Students Against Sweatshops (HSAS), a campaign of the Progressive Students Labor Movement, believes Harvard made a serious mistake when it signed with the attractively misnamed Fair Labor Association (FLA) rather than the Workers' Rights Consortium (WRC). The WRC is a third-party industry monitoring group with no ties to the industries it investigates while the FLA's governing board is dominated by these industries. Harvard's decision to sign with the FLA suggests that, while Harvard has formally committed in principle to fight sweatshop production of apparel and other insignia goods, it has not yet effectively embraced this commitment.

These monitoring groups should inspect factories producing Harvard goods and apparel to make sure they do not operate under sweatshop conditions. In fact, these monitoring groups are critical to Harvard's commitment to fair labor practices because they not only help discover factories that violate its code of conduct, but they also determine when factories have reformed their practices to follow the code of conduct. It is understood that workers need their jobs so the purpose has always been to reform violating factories through negotiations or sanctions rather than closing them down or ending their contracts. It is not difficult to see that full and accurate information gathering by monitoring groups is of the utmost importance.

In light of this, the WRC's virtues are clear. Its advisory board has strong ties with local community groups and garment unions in countries where inspections take place. It also has connections with groups who already do independent monitoring in those regions. The WRC also has good inspection policies in that it will make unannounced visits to factories and will use its community connections to speak to workers outside of the factory environment. The list of violations it inspects for is also close to Harvard's own; the information it publishes will be useful to the administration. All in all, the WRC is likely to collect and disseminate as full and accurate information as possible about the factories. Moreover, the WRC's governing board is split between selected representatives from its advisory board and university representatives, who have been chosen by universities working with the WRC.

On the other hand, business and industry organizes and continues to run the FLA. Indeed, it recently announced that it intends to hire Price Waterhouse Coopers, a business services corporation with ties to most major garment manufacturers, to do its field-work. The FLA also has bad inspection policies. It does not require the results of site visits be made public, it announces where and when it will inspect factories, it allows companies to select monitors and list which factories should be monitored and it deals with third party complaints in a convoluted way. The FLA leaves such matters in the hands of the Executive Director, without any accountability measures. Moreover, FLA does not inspect all of the possible violations, including certain health and safety regulations and women's rights issues. In addition, the FLA structured its Board of Directors so that industry and business have a majority of the votes and can control its policy changes. The university can wield very little, if any, influence in the FLA. The FLA has yet to inspect a single factory.

Clearly, the administration should switch from the FLA to the WRC. Pure logic sides with the WRC, and it costs Harvard next to nothing to switch. But why hasn't Harvard done as many universities recently have and made the change? The WRC has set April 1 as its cut-off date for universities to particpate in the first round of agenda-setting and decision-making.

Last year, a Crimson poll showed that two-thirds of the students supported the HSAS's efforts, and just a few weeks ago, the Undergraduate Council passed a resolution recommending the administration switch from the FLA to the WRC by a huge majority. Clearly, as has been suggested in the past, the HSAS does not represent just a small fraction of students. The students deserve to be not only heard, but to have a vote when it comes to making sweatshop policy decisions. More to the point, Harvard should switch from the FLA to the WRC.

Alexander H. Gourevitch '00 is a social studies concentrator in Cabot House. He is a member of Harvard Students Against Sweatshops.