When I posted last, in early May, USAS had won fifty-seven campus disaffiliations from Russell over the course of the spring semester in protest of the apparel company’s labor policies in Honduras, specifically its decision to close a newly-unionized factory  Jerzees de Honduras factory in the wake of its unionization.

Since then, nearly thirty more campuses have joined the Russell boycott, bringing the total to eighty-four. New recruits to the cause include merchandising bigwigs the University of Arizona, Brown, Louisville, the University of Florida, and North Carolina State. USAS is now calling this “the largest collegiate boycott of an apparel company in history.”

You can follow the story as it develops at USAS’s Boycott Russell Athletic blog, which I’ve added to our blogroll today.

This week Boston College and the entire University of California system announced their intention to terminate contracts with RA, bringing to fifty-seven the number of colleges and universities that have disaffiliated so far this year.

The campaign against Russell Athletic stems from the company’s history of anti-labor activity in Honduras, specifically its closing of the Jerzees de Honduras factory in the wake of its unionization.

So what’s happened since?

Well, legislators backed off of their threat to immediately axe UMD’s state funding over the screening, but they’re planning to revisit the issue in the fall. The state legislature directed the university to establish a policy on porn on campus before September 1, and at their Friday meeting the university’s regents told the UMD chancellor to present them with a set of recommendations for such a policy by summer.

In other news, the UMD College Park president, uninterested in picking any new fights with right-wing politicians, has overriden a vote of the university senate to drop the opening prayer from the university’s commencement ceremonies. The senate had voted 32-14 to abandon the prayer, with all of the senate’s student members voting with the majority.

The UMD College Park Student Power Party, the campus activists who staged the porn-screening-slash-free-speech-forum, have apparently seen all their candidates go down to defeat in the student government’s executive board elections. Election results aren’t official yet, though, as one of the other slates has charges of campaign violations pending.

Finally, the university’s student government voted unanimously on Thursday to oppose UMD’s contract with apparel-maker Russell Athletic. More than two dozen colleges and universities have dumped RA since the beginning of the year, in response to findings of labor violations at one of RA’s Honduras factories.

• The University of Montana has become the 20th campus to cut ties with Russell. In a letter to the company, UM Executive Vice President  Jim Foley said, “We believe that your actions constitute a violation of our vendor code of conduct, which we implemented together with faculty, students and staff on our campus and we expect as a licensee for you to uphold.”

• Students in England protested Russell at the UK headquarters of RA’s parent company, Fruit of the Loom, on Tuesday. One group of protesters staged a die-in as others dressed as the “Fruit of Doom” mock-trampled them.

• In an effort to blunt the effect of United Students Against Sweatshops’ Rein In Russell blog, which is located at reininrussell.blogspot.com, Russell Athletic has apparently purchased the domain reininrussell.com, which it is operating as a mirror of its “Social Responsibility Resource Site.” 

• Russell’s critics have found their way to the Russell Athletic facebook fan page.

When we passed on word that the University of Minnesota had dropped RA, we were under the impression that the action had been taken by Minnesota’s flagship Twin Cities campus alone. As it turns out, the entire U of M system — Twin Cities, Duluth, Morris, Crookston, and Rochester — have disaffiliated, and shortly after Minnesota acted, Harvard followed suit.

Finally, on Friday, NYU became the nineteenth campus to drop RA. 

NYU’s decision, in the works since early February, would seem to represent a missed opportunity for the activist group Take Back NYU. Had they called for a break with RA as part of their sit-in demands last week, they would have linked their action to a student-led campus movement that is gaining momentum across the United States, and — as it turns out — have been able to point to Friday’s decision as a victory of sorts.

March 19 Update: The total now stands at 21 campuses, and you can find an update on recent organizing here.

May 1 Update: FIFTY-SEVEN campuses. Wow!

This evening, United Students Against Sweatshops announced on its twitter feed that the University of Minnesota has become the latest institution to end its contract with Russell.

The New York Times took notice of the wave of disaffiliations yesterday, quoting the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium as saying that RA had “over a period of two years … engaged in the systematic abuse of the associational rights of its workers in Honduras, thereby gravely and repeatedly violating the universities’ codes of conduct.”

The disaffiliations have come in response to tremendous local student pressure on each campus, and that pressure is continuing to build. Check out the USAS blog Rein In Russell to follow the story as it develops.

March 2 update: The total is up to nineteen.

March 5 update: Now it’s twenty.

Second March 5 update: Hello USAS twitterers! Our feed is here.

March 19 Update: Here are some highlights of the last two weeks’ organizing.

In November the Worker Rights Consortium released a report finding “substantial credible evidence” of such retaliation, and in late January the Fair Labor Association found that RA had engaged in “inappropriate and unacceptable actions” in response to labor organizing.

In a statement, a UW representative said that RA had not “has not met our expectations” regarding workers’ rights.

May 1 Update: FIFTY-SEVEN campuses to date. Wow!

He’s done this twice before, taking a journalism student to the Central African Republic and a medical student to Rwanda and the Congo. That second trip resulted in a documentary, “Reporter,” that will be shown on HBO later this year.

You can learn more about the contest in Kristof’s column and in his blog. Instructions for entering can be found here.

Update: Kristof recently wrote a column arguing that “sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause,” and that “the best way to help people in the poorest countries isn’t to campaign against sweatshops but to promote manufacturing there.” Critiques of his stance can be found in letters to the editor here, as well as in this piece at TPM. Kristof expanded on his argument a bit further in this blogpost, which has attracted a bunch of comments.

Panels will discuss a variety of practical topics, including How To Build Transnational Social Movements Using New Technology, How To Use New Mobile Technologies and How To Preserve Group Safety And Security.

Summit participants will also be honored at a red-carpet event with entertainment celebrities, business leaders, and civil society figures at the former home of MTV’s Total Request Live (“TRL”) overlooking Times Square.

Howcast will use the field manual for youth empowerment developed at the Summit as the cornerstone of a much larger online “hub,” where emerging youth organizations can access and share “how-to” guides and tips on how to use social-networking and other technologies to promote freedom and justice and counter violence, extremism and oppression. The hub will include instructional videos and text guides, links to related online resources and discussion forums for sharing experiences, ideas and advice.

The schedule for the summit is available here, with links to streaming video from every session.

So officials at the University of Washington must have been surprised when more than a dozen banner-toting students appeared in the university president’s office last Thursday to protest UW’s just-concluded deal to extend its contract with Nike to provide the school’s athletic equipment and uniforms.

“President Emmert has a clear choice,” UW senior Ashley Edens, a spokeswoman for the protesters, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “He can repudiate his commitment to workers rights and sign a contract with Nike that would guarantee that UW apparel is produced in sweatshop conditions of the next 10 years. Or he can listen to concerned students and their allies, and recommit to a comprehensive set of labor stands that would ensure that UW’s Nike apparel would be produced under fair conditions.”

Students expect the contract to be presented to the UW Board of Regents next month, and we’ll be following this story as it develops.

(Thanks to Rod Palmquist of United Students Against Sweatshops for the heads-up.)