Students sit in against sweatshops

April 22—Several students and workers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are entering the sixth day of a sit-in in Chancellor James Moeser’s lobby, the longest sit-in at UNC since 1993. About 25 students and workers entered the administration building on April 17 and have been occupying it ever since.

FI ST members Ben Carroll (center) and Salma Mirza (right) at student sit-in. WW photo: Peter Gilbet

These students and workers are affiliated with Student Action with Workers (SAW), a UNC group affiliated with United Students against Sweatshops, as well as several other campus groups that are part of the Sweatfree Coalition and the community-based youth group FIST—Fight Imperialism, Stand Together.

Brand names such as Nike and Adidas are currently partnered with UNC to make apparel bearing the “Carolina” name. These brands source the apparel from factories all over the world and have been paying increasingly lower prices for the apparel.

It is in the brands’ best interests to pay as little as possible to these factories for the clothing produced by the workers. This in turn forces factory owners to cut the wages of the workers producing the apparel.

The workers, however, have not remained silent. Many have tried to organize their factories or become involved in union activities. These attempts are met with harsh consequences: union organizers have been assaulted, harassed, fired and even killed. In addition, brands often “cut and run” from factories in which a union has been established, sometimes leaving hundreds of workers without jobs or means of livelihood.

What is important in this situation is the power dynamic. While brands have power over the factories, administrations of universities have power over the brands. Recently, students have begun putting pressure on their administrations to compel brands to pay enough to factories for a living wage, as well as to allow freedom of association among all workers.

In 1999, students at UNC held a 72-hour sit-in to pressure the university to adopt codes of conduct which would ensure freedom of association and a living wage for workers producing Carolina apparel. However, almost 10 years later, these codes are still not being enforced because brands refuse to pay enough to the factories to allow for these worker gains. In fact, when factories do follow these codes of conduct, they are penalized by losing orders to other factories that pay their workers lower wages.

The Designated Suppliers Program was designed to combat the practice of “cut and run” by requiring brands to source their apparel from factories that uphold these basic human rights—a living wage and the right to organize. The DSP, once adopted by a university, begins a gradual process of sourcing increasing amounts of apparel from fair labor factories. These practices would be monitored in the factories by a third-party non-profit agency called the Worker Rights Consortium. Already, 42 universities have signed on to the DSP, including Duke, Cornell, Columbia and the entire University of California system. For three years, students in SAW have carried out a campaign to ask the UNC chancellor to adopt the DSP and uphold the labor codes that the university already has in place.

The UNC sit-in is the fourth sit-in in the country in the past two weeks in support of the DSP, starting with an April 15 sit-in at Pennsylvania State University where 31 students were arrested. Later that week, nine students were arrested at the University of Montana, followed by six arrested at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. With the UNC-CH sit-in currently in its sixth day, students at the University of Florida have begun a hunger strike.

“The university tries to portray itself as a university for the people, but this struggle around the DSP exposes their true motives—profits and friendly relationships with big corporations,” stated Ben Carroll, member of both SAW and FIST. “While the university likes to talk about respecting workers rights, it does everything it can to ignore the demand for a DSP for apparel with the UNC logo. This apparel brings in huge profits for the university because of the cheap labor they are able to secure by superexploitation of workers. The university won’t sign on to this program because it would contradict their established capitalist relationships.”

For more information, visit dsp4unc.wordpress.com/

Gomaa is a member of both SAW at UNC and the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill chapter of the youth group FIST. She has been an active participant in the sit-ins.