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NEWS & LETTERS, February - March 2007YouthAnti-sweatshop strugglesby Alex Maktoob Students from the Purdue Organization for Labor Equality and the Purdue Alliance of Libertarian Socialists, joined by leaders of national and local labor, broke bread on the steps of Purdue’s administration building Dec. 13, marking the end of a 26-day hunger strike to force Purdue to adopt a policy aimed at remedying some of the egregious human rights offenses that take place in the production of collegiate apparel. The policy, the Designated Suppliers Program (DSP), requires Purdue’s licensees--companies that manufacture products bearing Purdue’s logo--to source from factories that meet a set of requirements: 1) the factory must demonstrate respect for workers’ associational rights, 2) allow workers to bargain for a living wage, and 3) demonstrate compliance with Purdue’s existing Code of Conduct. Purdue’s Code of Conduct already requires its licensees to abide by these conditions and goes further in many respects, including regulating the length of the workday and setting standards that respect women’s rights. The decision to stop the hunger strike came after Purdue’s President, Martin C. Jischke, rejected the proposal after a meeting with striking students that took place a week earlier. His reasons for rejecting the DSP--concerns about antitrust laws, unionization requirements, and price fixing--were all addressed by the students in that meeting. Not only were these concerns addressed, but the President’s remarks were in direct contradiction with official Purdue policy as outlined in Purdue’s Code of Conduct, a piece of policy that was also pushed and ultimately won by anti-sweatshop hunger strikers in 2001. Furthermore, the President’s decision was not even directed to students who invoked the meeting, but to the committee created to “advise” the President on licensing issues. In reality this committee was created to divert student voices and power even at the highest point of student activism Purdue University has seen in years. The strikers’ declining health was also a reason for ending the strike, as day-by-day students were losing weight at a severe rate and visiting emergency rooms more frequently. The end of the hunger strike without the signing of the DSP hardly means that it was ineffective. The response from the action was enormous, prompting the most media attention a single DSP action has ever achieved. The students camped out in a building next to the student union, studying, sleeping, and living there. Our experiences were mainly positive; although some students chose to heckle us in childish manners, more often those who stopped by the encampment wanted to learn about the campaign and showed their support by signing our paper petition, which gathered over 1,800 signatures. In addition, an online petition gathered a near equal amount of signatures from people all over the world, from students to factory workers, from California to Kenya. Student-worker solidarity was the central theme of the hunger strike. Workers that produce collegiate apparel were fully behind the strike and presented their support in many different ways. Kenyan garment workers in particular pushed for President Jischke to accept the proposal, making a video and posting it to the Internet, and calling his office directly, only to have the phone hung up on them. Many different workers and labor groups supported the action, not only those from the garment industry. A worker from a nearby steel fabrication plant pledged his support by giving us a metal disk inscribed with “DSP” and his signature, while Purdue’s own custodial staff and service workers (some of the lowest paid in schools similar in size to Purdue) emphatically voiced their support when signing our paper petition. At the breaking of the fast, national and local leaders of the AFL-CIO as well as the United Steel Workers pledged their full support of the effort, giving Purdue until March 21 to sign the DSP or be prepared to face the combined effort of hundreds of thousands of union activists and unfaltering student will and ability. USAS BACKGROUND Passage of the DSP is part of a larger campaign known as the Sweat-Free Campus campaign, which is coordinated by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). USAS originated in the mid-1990s by UNITE interns organizing around anti-sweatshop campus campaigns. Since then, USAS has grown to over 200 campuses across the U.S. and Canada, making it one of the largest student activist groups in these nations. It also began taking on different labor rights issues including breaking campus contracts with Coca-Cola with regards to that corporation’s ruthless attack on union leaders in Latin America and pushing universities to provide associational rights and a living wage for workers on campus. Campus chapters of USAS, like the Purdue Organization for Labor Equality, have relative autonomy concerning what actions they want to perform, meaning they can take part in a larger campaign or act independently. With this structure, USAS serves as a coalition against sweatshops rather than a dogmatic, hierarchical organization. Another distinction of USAS from earlier incarnations of the anti-sweatshop movement has been its constant dialogue with the very workers who produce collegiate apparel through its intern programs and the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent monitoring group created as a result of USAS efforts. While the anti-sweatshop movement in the early ‘90’s focused on executing actions that would be potentially detrimental to garment workers, the dialogue between students and workers has made it such that USAS campaigns focus on pushing for the same demands that workers are fighting for at their own factories. These two factors have made the USAS model attractive for many young activists with an interest in leftist politics and/or human rights issues. POSTMODERNIST INFLUENCE However, while the structure of USAS is not dogmatic and the organization has opened a dialogue between students and workers, it contains a number of philosophical problems. Although USAS does not have an express ideological position, it puts forth a set of ideas called its “principles of unity.” These principles stress a focus on reaching decisions democratically and reducing prejudice through “anti-oppression tactics.” The most significant aspect of this set of principles, however, is that although there is so much emphasis on remedying the miseries of capitalism--a system that the document recognizes as “a flawed system” with “inherent defects”--it refuses to take the next logical step and be expressly anti-capitalist. Recognizing the flaws in capitalism and pointing them out is one thing, but retreating right before stating that its abolition is needed is another. As a result, the “anti-oppression” that USAS endorses takes all the faults of capitalism, “racism, sexism, homophobia, classism” (a prejudice against those without a high level of income!) as separate forms of oppression, all to be fought on various disjointed fronts. To combat this oppression, USAS institutes a caucus system “to confront the prejudices we have internalized as the result of living and learning in a flawed and oppressive society.” This caucus system separates targets of oppression and their “oppressors,” having the “victims” find ways to channel their oppression, while the oppressors degrade themselves to the level of victims to deal with their own prejudices. This kind of “self-development” and training reeks of post-modernity, the notion that oppression is an individual decision and that all forms of oppression are the result of individual prejudice. Post-modernity and its identity politics cannot see that each of these forms is just a moment in the destructive process, in the rending of our subjective human potential from our historical reality. Without requiring the dialectical negation of capitalism as an essential step in gaining our humanity, United Students Against Sweatshops and the student anti-sweatshop movement perpetuate the “is-ness” of capitalism along with all its atrocities. This is why it is important for members of the student and youth movements to use organizations such as USAS and its affiliated organizations not only to organize on social justice issues, but also to open these organizations up further and show how these struggles are all connected in an effort against capital. These organizations also serve as an idea exchange where students and youth can explore real workers’ struggles. Through this exchange and development, we can seek a unity between theory and practice that, instead of perpetuating existing oppression with identity politics, seeks to puncture our fetishized existence and overturn the logic of capitalism. |
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