Harvard Sweats Apparel Plan

While other top universities are backing a new initiative intended to ensure that products bearing their school insignias aren’t produced under sweatshop-like conditions, Harvard is withholding its support for the effort.

Although 33 schools—including Brandeis, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, the University of Michigan, and 10 University of California campuses—have endorsed the year-old initiative, Harvard says it needs more time to make a decision on the issue.

Harvard is already a member of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), a group of over 150 schools that monitors university-licensed apparel companies and their contractors. The University announced that it would join the WRC in December 2003, after five years of lobbying by student anti-sweatshop activists.

In January, the consortium’s board endorsed a new initiative, the Designated Suppliers Program (DSP), which would require licensees to allocate sufficient funds to foreign contractors so that employees can take home a living wage and workplace conditions can be adequate.

But the consortium’s board has clarified that the endorsement is a recommendation, not an obligation. “It’s not a requirement that any school affiliated with the WRC adopt any policy beyond the basic code of conduct,” said an assistant director of policy and communications at the WRC, Nancy E. Steffan.

Indeed, eight months after the board’s endorsement, Harvard has yet to sign on to the DSP.

“We’ve been following the developments of the DSP,” said Harvard’s senior director of federal and state relations, Kevin Casey. “As of right now I don’t believe that we are in the actual decision-making mode. We are still in the information-gathering mode.”

Casey also said the University had certain concerns as to just how helpful the new program would be. The DSP requires that foreign factories under contract with licensed producers devote at least 50 percent of their yearly output to the “collegiate market” or “to other buyers willing to meet the same standards and pricing obligations as university licensees,” according to organization documents.

This concentration of production, according to a DSP policy statement, helps to ensure stable employment for factory workers engaged in making university goods at DSP locations.

But the problem, according to Casey, is what happens to the jobs of those working in factories that don’t currently come close to meeting the majority production standards.

“There are certain locations where [university apparel] is being made right now that it would no longer be being made in,” he said.

“It would be possible that those jobs would disappear, and we have a concern for the local workers in that case,” he went on.

Harvard Student Labor Action Movement leader Jamila R. Martin ’07 questioned the University’s commitment to the consortium’s mission. “It was basically signing on without really signing on,” she said of the school’s 2003 move.

Responding to Harvard’s concerns about the DSP, Martin said that “the idea that this is going to make jobs less stable just doesn’t really make sense.”

“The whole idea of the DSP is to create stable jobs.”

Job stability is just one of the objectives that the DSP hopes to address. While the WRC previously confined its efforts to ensuring that university-licensed companies presented foreign contractors with certain codified standards for workers’ rights, the new program would require that companies take the extra step of giving the factories money to make certain that the maintenance of such standards is a possibility.

The new measures came in response to a lack of progress in areas where a desperation for employment undercut concerns for appropriate conditions and compensation, according to the WRC’s Steffan.

“We would see an erosion of improvements because of the price pressure that the factories are under,” she said. “While on the one hand the companies would say you need to abide by this code of conduct, on the other hand they would keep asking for greater price reductions. Then there’d be an allusion of compliance because actual compliance is not financially feasible.”

Steffan also said licensees would often skip quickly from one foreign factory to another to avoid regulation.

“We would get complaints from workers in factories where we thought we’d be able to do something,” she said. “We’d find that we couldn’t do anything because the licensee was no longer there.”

The DSP includes a provision mandating three-year contracts between companies and the foreign factories that produce university goods to prevent such evasion.

Before any such plans can be implemented, however, more support for DSP is needed.

“We need more [schools] than we have now,” said Duke University’s director of trademark licensing and store operations, Jim Wilkerson, who also serves as a DSP working group chair.

“We don’t know what that magic number is,” Wilkerson added. “But we all recognize that broader participation by schools will lead to better implementation of the DSP.”

Even with two Ivies and several large state and private universities among the 30 schools who have signed on to support the DSP, many of the WRC’s 158 member institutions remain tentative about endorsing the new measures.

“I think the students can best help by talking to their colleagues at those institutions that have not yet issued support for the program,” wrote Cornell’s DSP working group representative, Mike Powers, in an e-mail.

Consortium members who haven’t endorsed DSP include Brown, MIT, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Pennsylvania, and Williams College, according to the consortium’s website.