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Three weeks ago, we reported that the University of Wisconsin had cut ties with clothing manufacturer Russell Athletic over findings that RA had violated workers’ rights at a Honduras factory. Since then Duke, the University of Washington, Purdue, Columbia, Penn State, Cornell, and Michigan have all followed suit, bringing to twelve Russell’s total university disaffiliations since the end of January.
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.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison announced on Thursday that it was cutting its ties to Russell Athetic, the clothing manufacturer. RA has been accused of closing a factory in Honduras in retaliation for union organizing there.
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!
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose beat includes poverty, sex trafficking, and disease in the developing world, is holding a contest to find an American student to join him on a reporting trip to Africa.
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.
Columbia Law School is hosting an Alliance of Youth Movements Summit right now, with all sessions being broadcast live on the net. As the summit website puts it:
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.
Many American college campuses are ghost towns in June, July, and August, as administrators well know. As a result, summer tends to be a busy time for the implementation of decisions that would likely meet with student protest if announced during the school year.
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.)
studentactivism.net 
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