At colleges nationwide, growing numbers of students are taking on a new extracurricular activity: the labor movement.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney opened labor's arms to student involvement at the labor-academic teach-ins of 1996. Students were even then protesting the domination of the world economy by U.S. corporations that profit on sweatshop labor.

Working with the National Labor Committee, the UNITE! apparel union and the AFL-CIO, students identified especially with the young people abroad working for $20-$30 a week under terrible conditions to produce collegiate logo apparel for corporations such as Nike.

The students petitioned, protested and joined in waves of civil disobedience that forced over 90 schools to affiliate with the Workers' Rights Consortium, which monitors sweated labor around the world.
In "Students Against Sweatshops," Liza Featherstone traces the evolution of this new student movement and its increasing ties with organized labor.

Living wage battle
Activist students broadened their focus to include exploited workers on their campuses, such as Harvard University, where vendors paid food and custodial workers wages as low as $6.25 an hour with no benefits. The students and workers pressed Harvard to adopt Boston's "living wage" minimum of $10.25 an hour, but the University refused.

The students sat down in the university president's office for 21 days, taking an action the workers could not for fear of firings and providing the subject of the dramatic new documentary video, "Occupation."

The campus unions supported the action with demonstrations and made sure that food was delivered to the students. Finally Harvard backed down and negotiations brought workers up to the living wage.

The Featherstone book also covers Harvard and other campus struggles for labor rights for food, laundry and custodial workers and graduate students and adjunct (part-time) faculty members.

University campuses are becoming one of the most fertile and vocal arenas for labor organizing. Student involvement is a key factor in these efforts and has also extended to labor struggles and strikes off campus. More and more, we see young faces, tomorrow's workers and union activists, joining us in all types of labor protests.

—Ken Nash
DC 37 Ed Fund Library, Room 211

"Students Against Sweatshops" by Liza Featherstone and United Students Against Sweatshops is published by Verso (2002, $15). "Occupation," a 44-minute film about the Harvard living wage sit-in, was directed by Maple Razsa and Pacho Velez and is available for $30 from www.enmassefilms.org.