The battle against sweatshops is bound to be long and hard-fought, but in the coming months Duke and several other universities will have some practice storming the beach.
Officials from five sweatshop-conscious campuses are participating in a pilot project this fall that will give the schools some real-world experience in monitoring the factories that make their licensed apparel. Although the initiative was announced Wednesday, it has been under consideration for the past year by Duke, Boston College, Georgetown University and the universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wisconsin at Madison.
"The main point of this project is to go from the classroom into the field," said Jim Wilkerson, director of Duke Stores. "It would not surprise me if we find out that bringing companies into compliance is more time-consuming than we might now believe."
He added that participation in the project will give Duke a chance to know how to assess the accuracy of reports from the full-scale monitoring system being put in place by the Fair Labor Association. "We've personally got to know more and learn more to be able to gauge the accuracy of what we're told in the future," said Wilkerson, who is also co-chair of the University Advising Council of the FLA.
The project-which is being organized and administered by the schools' licensing agent, the Collegiate Licensing Company-is in the process of recruiting companies to voluntarily submit their factories to monitors' scrutiny. An independent monitoring firm will then be responsible for making on-site visits to the factories and determining whether working conditions meet the standards in the CLC's code of conduct.
"I see the project as being mainly an opportunity for information-gathering and essentially learning more about the process of what goes into the actual system of monitoring," said Bruce Siegal, CLC's vice president and general counsel.
Each of the five schools has agreed to pay $10,000 to finance the project, although the contributions will be reduced if other schools come on board. Wilkerson said a few other universities have expressed interest but have not officially joined the group.
The project will eventually select between three and five manufacturers, and will monitor several factories from each of them, Siegal said.
But Sara Jewett, an organizer for Duke's Students Against Sweatshops, said she was concerned because the companies are volunteering and choosing which of their factories can be monitored.
Wilkerson said the University will be working with the companies to guide their factory selections.
For example, he said, it is important that the factories be in places where systematic monitoring is likely in the future, so the schools and monitors can have some experience working in the various countries. "I entirely agree that any selection of sites done entirely by the companies would not be credible or effective, and it would not meet Duke's goals," he said.
Jewett added that because this is a trial run, any non-compliance found in factories will have little effect on the companies' licensing contracts. Instead, the monitors will work with the companies to remediate the problems.
"This can't have any legitimacy as an actual monitoring project," she said, adding that this was her personal belief, not that of SAS, which has not met to discuss the project. "The dangers in it far outweigh its possible benefits."
Siegal stressed that the project is mainly designed for information-gathering, and that such a goal can be accomplished through working with the companies to select the factories. "This is not to suggest that this is a substitute for the actual independent monitoring that would take place once the systems are up and running," he said.
The University is also participating in a pilot project with the International Labor Rights Fund Project, a group formed in 1986 to monitor practices such as forced or child labor.
Duke, with 21 other colleges and universities, will be working with the organization on a one-year pilot program to help nongovernmental organizations in four countries in Asia and Latin America gain the skills necessary to participate more fully in the monitoring process of local companies.
Jewett expressed much more optimism about the benefits of this plan. "In general, I tend to think it's better to work with NGOs and labor groups within the different countries in which we'll be working," she said.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.