The co-chairs of a University of Washington student-faculty-staff committee on sweatshop labor have resigned their positions and dismantled the committee, citing a fractious atmosphere of mistrust and ambiguity. The future of sweatshop monitoring at the PAC-10 school is in doubt.
UW president Mark Emmert reconstituted the group, called the Licensing Advisory Committee (LAC), in 2007 to study how the school ought to respond to student activists' demands for the UW to join the Designated Suppliers Program, a fair-trade consortium of schools who would hold apparel manufacturers to standards in the area of wages and working conditions.
The LAC was also tasked with revising and updating UW's Code of Conduct for the some 300 manufacturers who make licensed Huskies apparel, then finding better ways of ensuring that these licensees -- who contract with numerous factories in poor nations -- live up to it.
It was a task whose daunting nature was evident this spring, when International Studies majors came back from a fact-finding trip to Guatemala with tales of abusive practices by a college licensee, Gear For Sports, which makes UW sportswear under the brand name Champion ("Seniors find problems with Husky apparel," Sept. 10-16).
As the committee tried to direct the college's Trademarks and Licensing department to take action, staff in the department, who also sit on the committee, neglected to disclose that the licensees' contract was about to expire.
Then in August, the committee learned that Trademarks and Licensing had just finished a 10-year, $39 million contract with Nike to supply athletic teams with gear and uniforms emblazoned with the company's trademark swoosh.
Those pieces of news, wrote LAC co-chair Margaret Levi in a parting letter to Emmert, showed how licensing and athletics departments "do not always provide us with what we need to know about their operations and upcoming decisions."
Being kept in the dark about University licensing actions, Levi's letter continues, means that "for many of LAC's members and those who follow its deliberations, LAC has become window dressing rather than an effective force for creating policy and providing oversight."
Levi, an associate professor of Political Science, and committee co-chair and graduate student Trevor Griffey tendered their resignations to Emmert in a meeting Tues., Sept. 9, and each provided written explanations for the LAC's demise. Griffey wrote that the decision to renew the Nike contract "produced a crisis of confidence among some faculty and students (myself included) in both the structure of LAC and the good faith of the university administration to enforce its code of conduct."
Then, when internal criticism rose to a flashpoint, administrators, writes Griffey, reacted defensively. He says that requests for more information about the Nike contract went unanswered.
The committee "had an exceptionally respectful and thoughtful dialog" in its 18 months of existence, says Griffey, "but once we had to make a decision about challenging brands, the discussion became more contentious and factions hardened."
The UW Board of Regents will consider the Nike contract at its October meeting.
For activist George Robertson, who joined the UW Student Labor Action Project this spring after writing research reports for the committee, its end marks the conclusion of a disappointing means of resolving sweatshop problems.
"Students, from the first, saw LAC as a diversionary tactic through which the administration could appear to be active [on fair-trade apparel issues] but really slow things down."
"If the administration can't inform the committee" about its negotiation of the athletics apparel contract, the UW's largest, "that's a real indication that when things really matter, they close ranks and tend to act unilaterally."