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I haven’t posted much about the Russell Athletic story this last while, but I got an email yesterday from United Students Against Sweatshops that demonstrates that their work has really been moving forward.
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.
United Students Against Sweatshops has extended its remarkable string of victories against clothing-maker Russell Athletic.
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.
The University of Vermont student activists who occupied their university’s administration building last week have issued a revised list of demands.
When the activists of Students Stand Up occupied the UVM admin building on Wednesday, they presented the president with thirteen demands, each of which related to budgetary and labor issues. In a news release last night, however, they replaced those thirteen demands with just four.
They call those four demands “the core concerns that are the base of our campaign and our new understanding of what is feasible.”
The first two demands on the new list are substantively the same as the first two on the old list: SSU wants UVM to reverse all dismissals and non-reappointments that it has announced, and cancel all plans for new layoffs. The third new demand is in essence the same as the eleventh from the original list — SSU wants “a democratic process by which students, staff, and faculty have decisive roles in decisions regarding the budget.”
(We’ll get back to that third demand in a subsequent post. It’s a big one, and an important one.)
The fourth demand is a revised version of the eighth demand on the old list — SSU is calling for administrative compensation at UVM to be cut, in order to “save as many positions as possible.” Instead of firing faculty and staff, in other words, make administrators take a pay cut.
There’s a fifth demand in their new statement, though it’s not included in the numbered list. They want UVM President Daniel Fogel to resign. By calling in police to arrest demonstrators last Wednesday instead of talking with them in good faith, they say, Fogel acted in a “disturbing and callous” way. Because of that lack of respect for dialogue and university community, they say, “we are issuing a call for his immediate resignation.”
For updates on Students Stand Up’s next moves, check out their Twitter feed. Also very much worth reading is this SSU member’s dissection of a budget memo released by UVM’s vice president on Friday.
Here are the thirteen demands put forward by the students who sat in at the University of Vermont yesterday:
1. REVOKE all DISMISSALS and non-reappointments thus far issued.
2. TERMINATE all plans for more layoffs and non-reappointments of staff and faculty.
3. Return positions that have been reduced to part-time back to FULL-TIME status.
4. Issue a statement of NEUTRALITY respecting the right of staff and faculty to ORGANIZE.
5. DISCLOSE all budget reconciliation options that were reviewed and considered prior to the decision to initiate layoffs.
6. DISCLOSE all information related to administrative compensation and bonuses.
7. Return ALL administrative BONUSES from FY `08 and FY `09 to the UVM general fund.
8. Return administrative salary pool to the 2002 levels.
9. Pursue all legal options to utilize the university’s ENDOWMENT to close the FY `10 operating budget gap.
10. CAP rate of TUITION and room and board fee increase at corresponding year rate of inflation.
11. Establish with us a democratic process by which students, staff, and faculty have a decisive role in decisions regarding the budget.
12. CAP student body population at Fall 2009 levels.
13. REINSTATE the varsity Softball and Baseball teams.
Last week a campus political party at the University of Maryland College Park defied their administration and some state legislators and screened about half an hour’s worth of a hardcore porn movie as part of a free-speech forum.
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.
studentactivism.net 
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