Almost two years after Duke began drafting its sweatshop code of conduct, the University remains on the front lines in the battle against sweatshop conditions in factories making college apparel.
Last week, President Nan Keohane sent a letter encouraging solidarity and continued diligence on sweatshop issues, to more than 70 college and university presidents.
She asked them to support the Fair Labor Association, a national monitoring partnership with representatives from the apparel industry and human rights groups. In March, the University and 16 other schools joined the fledgling organization.
In her letter, Keohane encouraged the presidents to send delegates to the first-ever meeting of the FLA's college and university advisory council, scheduled for mid-June. During the meeting, one representative from this council will be named to the FLA's 14-member board.
Since it was announced, the FLA has come under fire from activist groups that claim its standards are too low and its monitoring system is too weak. Specifically, they note, the FLA allows companies to recommend individual factories for monitoring, notifies factories in advance of some monitoring visits and keeps monitoring reports within the association. As a result, many schools have shied away from signing on to the FLA.
Although she acknowledged the FLA's weaknesses, Keohane encouraged schools to try to strengthen its protocol from within. She recommended an "FLA-plus system," in which schools participate in supplemental monitoring coalitions. Duke, for example, is in discussions with the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Georgetown University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan about a possible additional monitoring group.
Jim Wilkerson, director of Duke Stores and a national expert on sweatshop issues, said extra monitoring will help "audit" the FLA process. "It will allow us to compare information from those groups with information from the FLA until we develop a higher level of confidence with the program," he said.
Although Wilkerson said he hopes universities will respond to Keohane's letter by joining the FLA, he said it is not imperative that all schools adopt the same monitoring rules. It is, however, important that they make a strong commitment to eliminating sweatshops, he said.
But, "if lots of universities go in lots of different directions with code standards, then that, I think, will damage the code process, because it will be extremely difficult for companies to implement 20 or 30 or 40 or even 50 codes in each factory."
Keohane said she, too, fears these disagreements may weaken the anti-sweatshop movement. "I am concerned that we will dissipate our efforts as universities because of disagreements with specific provisions of the different codes and monitoring procedures," she said. "It is important that we work together to create a common system that will achieve our common goal: fair labor conditions for the workers who make collegiate licensed products."
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