From Manhattan's 39th St. to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, workers were beginning to reveal the oppressive, dangerous, and often illegal conditions under which they were working to produce the clothes bearing popular labels like Nike, Kathie Lee, and the Gap. Early on, students around the country realized the crucial role that their universities play in propping up the global sweatshop system, and the potential leverage they had to pressure their administrators to change that system. Students at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Michigan, and University of California-Irvine began to raise questions about their universities' affiliations with Nike, while students at University of Wisconsin-Madison did the same over their university's exclusive contract with Reebok.

The idea of the Sweat-Free Campus Campaign grew out of these earlier efforts. In the summer of 1997, interns at UNITE! designed the first organizing manual for this campaign and brought the idea to Union Summer participants and campus labor activists around the country. The idea behind the campaign was simple: our universities and colleges are complicit in the sweatshop system. Many universities directly profit from the exploitation of the women and men around the globe who make the clothes that bear their logo. To stop this cycle of indignity, we, as students, started to demand that our universities take responsibility for the conditions under which their licensed apparel is made by adopting Codes of Conduct to regulate the behavior of their manufacturers.

In July of 1998, student activists from over 30 different schools active in the campaign came together in New York for a weekend-long anti-sweatshop conference. During the weekend, students formed United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), conceived as an informal but cohesive international coalition of campuses and individual students working on anti-sweatshop and Code of Conduct campaigns. The general goals of the group were: 1) to provide coordination and communication between the many campus campaigns and 2) to coordinate student participation and action around the national, intercollegiate debate around Codes of Conduct and monitoring systems.

In just one year, USAS spread to over 100 campuses across the U.S. and Canada and raised awareness about the sweatshop issue to unprecedented levels. In response to student pressure, the Collegiate Licensing Company, a legal go-between for universities and manufacturers, proposed a Code of Conduct for the 150 colleges and universities it represents in January of 1999. A blatant attempt to abate student criticism, the CLC's Code of Conduct lacked the three basic principles that make any Code of Conduct effective: full public disclosure, a living wage provision, and a provision for women's rights. Students across the country resoundingly rejected the code. In January, students at Duke University staged a sit-in, winning a commitment from Duke to require full public disclosure of its licensees. Students at Georgetown University followed the Duke students' lead to their president's office, sitting in and winning commitments to full public disclosure. Students at UW-Madison joined in the wave of sit-ins and raised the floor by winning a commitment not only to disclosure, but also to a living wage study, sponsored by UW-Madison, and a clause on women's rights.

Meanwhile, the Fair Labor Association (a body set up by the Clinton Administration, composed of corporations and NGO's seeking to rid the world of sweatshops by means of 'voluntary company monitoring') was courting universities. Students, along with religious and labor organizations, had long dismissed the FLA as it allows companies to control the enforcement of its weak Code of Conduct. In fact, the FLA faced a crisis of legitimacy because of its inability to incorporate labor and progressive NGO's. To resolve the crisis, the FLA sought universities' membership as universities were seeking a way to subdue student criticism. Shortly after the Madison sit-in, many students were informed that their universities had joined the FLA or were close to doing so.

In response, students at U. Michigan decided to join in the strategy of civil disobedience. They sat-in and won a commitment to full disclosure, and student representation in the discussions around whether or not Michigan would join the FLA. Students at UNC-Chapel Hill followed suit, holding yet another successful sit-in, leaving the building with a commitment to disclosure, a living wage, and 'NO' to the FLA. (UNC joined anyway after students went on summer vacation.) The last of our first round of sit-ins came from the University of Arizona, where students sat-in for 10 days to come out of their chancellor's office victorious with a commitment to disclosure and other principles. Students at schools where a sit-in was neither practical nor a good campaign strategy also spent the spring organizing and winning! In one example, students at Middlebury got a strong Code of Conduct passed by building a strong diverse coalition of support on campus. In another example, students at Occidental College in Los Angeles got a strong Code of Conduct passed shortly after attending the first United States Student Association (USSA)/ USAS Grassroots Organizing Workshop (GROW).

In July of 1999, over 200 students gathered in Washington, DC for the second Sweat-Free Campus Conference. USAS hired its first staff organizer just before the conference and set up an office in DC. At the conference, we set up a governing structure for USAS to facilitate the continued success and expansion of this campaign. The conference body also decided to keep focusing on full public disclosure as a demand of the campaign and work to create an alternative to the FLA, which is now the Worker's Rights Consortium.

The industry buckled when faced with the prospect of losing collegiate sales, and in October 1999, Nike and other companies announced that they would comply with the requirement to publicly disclose their factory locations, the first time that any company in the garment industry had conceded to this basic demand after years of pressure by anti-sweatshop groups. Various organizations in the anti-sweatshop movement are currently undertaking efforts to compile this information and distribute it to partners in producing regions throughout the world, a step toward holding companies accountable by increasing coordination between organizations in the U.S. and the global South.

Students understood that codes of conduct were only a tool to work in partnership with unions and worker-allied NGOs in creating a space for empowerment in an industry where successful worker organizing is impeded by the threat of capital flight and the decentralized production networks of powerful corporations. Moreover, USAS understood that without an effective compliance mechanism, campus codes of conduct were worth little more than the paper they were written on and would do little to advance coordinated North-South efforts to organize the garment industry. For that reason, USAS convened a discussion within the anti-sweatshop movement following the victories of the 1998-99 academic year to create a model for verification of factory compliance with the codes. The public release of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) in October 1999 was the result of months of meetings and consultation with our partners throughout North America and the global South on how independent monitoring could be used as a tool to assist in worker empowerment and public accountability in the industry by, among other things: prioritizing long-term relationships between local human rights, religious, women's, and labor organizations and workers in communities where factories exist so that workers have a confidential mechanism to discuss issues in their workplace; making information about factory conditions available to the public to afford a greater level of accountability to the industry; supporting grassroots efforts by workers to organize themselves so they can monitor conditions and resolve grievances within their own workplaces; and, building global communication networks to more effectively understand changes in the industry and craft strategies for change.

Because the WRC is the anti-sweatshop movement's most coordinated response to the corporate models of monitoring that the industry has used to whitewash their abuses for years, companies strongly resisted universities joining the WRC. So, after months of campus education, enlisting community support, and negotiating through administrative channels, protests and direct action spread across the student movement for a second successive year. Building occupations and tent cities happened at more than 20 universities across the country, with street theater, public debates, protests, and other means of public pressure at dozens more.

As the WRC's founding conference approached in April of 2000, university membership in the WRC climbed from four to 50 thanks to coordinated student action. Students' successes quickly escalated the WRC into national debate when Nike CEO Phil Knight pulled a promised $30 million donation to the University of Oregon and pulled out of negotiations for a $22 million exclusive licensing contract with the University of Michigan after they joined the WRC. Essentially, university administrators were faced with a very real example of the industry critique students had been pushing all along in his reaction to Knight's decision, Univeristy of Michigan President Lee Bollinger issued an unprecedented statement: "Nike has chosen again to strike out at universities committed to finding appropriate ways to safeguard and respect human rights."

Despite Nike's bullying tactics, USAS expanded the WRC's membership to over 80 universities and colleges in just one year. On top of these successes, student codes of conduct and the student-supported WRC faced their first real tests through two student-supported worker organizing struggles--at the KukDong International factory (a Nike/Reebok production facility) in Atlixco de Puebla, Mexico, and the New Era factory in Derby, NY.

Students organized in coordination with KukDong factory workers since the WRC released its delegation-based fact-finding report on the situation in February 2001. Early on, student pressure in the KukDong campaign forced administrators at schools with hefty licensing contracts to admit that the clause for freedom of association in their codes of conduct had been breached -- fueled by the WRC's harshly critical report of illegal firings of worker organizers. Continued student pressure throughout the spring in turn forced Nike, Reebok, and KukDong management to engineer the reinstatement of every worker, including the originally-fired leaders of the unionization drive. This mass-reinstatement was the first such act in over 20 years in Mexico, and thus marks a notable shift in power for independent organizing drives in the maquila industry. USAS's success in pressuring Nike and Reebok to intercede at the KukDong factory is a testament to the strength of the code of conduct and WRC victories students have won with the Sweat-Free Campus Campaign.

Prompted by a USAS-led delegation in March of 2001 to the New Era factory, which produces caps for many colleges and universities, the WRC began its second full-scale factory investigation in the summer of 2001. The New Era campaign's goal was to presssure the baseball cap company, New Era, into meeting the demands of its striking factory workers in Derby, New York. Students pressured New Era into meeting these worker demands by having their colleges and universities discontinue or postpone their contracts with New Era after an investigation was done by the WRC. After a nearly year-long campaign, New Era gave in to worker demands in Derby, New York, USAS activists ran successful campaigns on their campus. THIRTEEN schools discontinued or postponed their New Era contracts! The outcome of this campaign is highly significant for USAS. The campaign tangibly demonstrates the power students have in the apparel industry, no matter where the factory is located! By threatening a large piece of a company's market, students are able to advocate for and improve workers rights.

USAS can count numerous important victories during 2002-2003, including campaigns that helped workers end the blacklisting of union members in El Salvador at the Tainan and Primo factories; and helped workers win the first union in a Free Trade Zone in the Caribbean basin in five years, at the BJ&B factory in the Dominican Republic -- each major victories that affect thousands of workers and that break new ground for freedom of association in the region. From the New York Times: "When workers first tried unionizing the BJ & B hat factory, the streets [of Villa Altagracia] were abuzz with rumors that the factory would rather close down than negotiate. Two years later, not only is the factory still around, but there also is a union, and it recently negotiated a labor contract that provides raises, scholarships, and other benefits that are unheard of among the country's 500 foreign-owned plants. The pact, signed last week, was the latest victory for a once unlikely coalition of United States college students, labor activists, and brands." (NYT 4/4/03). BJ & B was an incredible victory for workers in the Dominican Republic and of course for USAS!

In Fall of 2003, USAS launched international internship program places students each summer with worker support organizations throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This program seeks to strengthen students' direct relationships with international worker-led solidarity, to further defend the right to organize and fight for living wages globally. Internes return to challenge the premises of the corporate-driven "free trade" agenda that brings attacks on workers' rights, wages, and working conditions. The program began with seven placements by the Summer of 2003, and has expanded such that as of Summer 2005, there are placements in 14 countries!

USAS members are currently embarking upon a new phase of international solidarity, demanding full disclosure of the wages paid to workers in the collegiate apparel industry as well as the volume of production that licensees place into each of their factories; that brands not cut and run in the face of worker organizing and independent monitoring; and that licensees not shift production to regions in which the right to organize independent unions is barred by law. In this pivotal moment for the global garment industry, as the World Trade Organizations textile quotas are eliminated, USAS members face a turning point, and they are meeting it head on.

Since its inception, USAS has achieved unparalleled success, and has consequently been able to expand its work, while keeping true to its mission of standing in solidarity with workers. By 2003, USAS members began to look to their immediate communities, and the exploitative working conditions found in our campuses - our next logical step was to look at the nature of our educational institutions themselves. What we found was appalling - that our schools were paying their employees poverty wages, not providing affordable healthcare, and often waging severe anti-union campaigns. Students immediately began taking action, as USAS launched the National Campus Living Wage campaign, coordinated by the Campus Community Solidarity Committee. Dozens of successful living wage campaigns were undertaken throughout the country, including at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, College of William and Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Virginia, and University of Wisconsin Ð Milwaukee. This year alone Swarthmore University and Georgetown University students both successfully achieved living wage policies after three years of campaigning; low wage workers at The George Washington University received an improved healthcare package; and students at Oberlin College successfully stood in solidarity with clerical workers as they negotiated a new contract. These are just a handful of the campaigns that have occurred. Students are continuing to work with campus employees at Northwestern University, University of Tennessee Ð Knoxville, Vanderbilt University, Western Michigan University, Moravian College, Washington University, and dozens of others. These victories have not been easily won, and often take years to accomplish - and grow every year.

Our most recent initiative takes into account the tremendous victories achieved with workers in garment factories and on college campuses, and is serving to expand student power to other areas in which educational institutions to business. Our current focuses in this regard are the Coca-Cola Company for its involvement in the murder of trade unionists in Colombia, and the Washington Post's Kaplan for their racist two-tier wage system and union busting tactics. Students at Bard College, Lake Forest College, Oberlin College, and Carleton College have all successfully forced their universities to sever its ties with the Coca-Cola Company. Students at Rutgers University, New York University, University of Michigan, University of California - Berkeley, Smith College, and several others are currently involved in the Coca-Cola campaign. USAS is working closely with the Killer Coke Campaign, the United Steelworkers of America, and other allies on this campaign. Students at Occidental College, the University of Buffalo, University of Idaho, and others are educating their campuses about the 22 month struggle of the Washington Posts' mailers to win a decent contract and an end to the Post's wage system that allows older white workers to achieve a wage rate of double that of their counterparts of Color - for doing the same work. Students are targeting Kaplan Test Prep Centers because they are owned by the Post, and are the Posts' biggest money maker.