Is Big Labor using student activists as pawns?

A recent article about student activists partaking in demonstrations across 50 college and university campuses around country against overseas sweatshops confirmed my suspicion that their aggressive agenda is being backed by big labor unions and human rights groups.

In the April 12 edition of Time Magazine, Jodie Morse wrote “At a time when campus protests are more likely to involve bans on booze than the US bombing of Yugoslavia, one cause seems to have galvanized students as nothing else in more than a decade. In the past three months the issue of sweatshop labor has sparked student sit-ins at Duke, Georgetown and the University of Wisconsin”.

“Backed by unions and human rights groups, students on more than 50 other campuses from Harvard to Holy Cross are circulating petitions, picketing college bookstores and launching websites calling for ‘sweat-free’ clothing. Michigan and Wisconsin, among other schools, have vowed to push licensing companies to disclose locations of textile factories and then guarantee certain wages and conditions for workers”. Michigan students have “pinpointed a factory in the Dominican Republic where workers earn just $.69 cents an hour making Michigan hats.”

Congressman George Miller, known to be in the deep pockets of the US textile labor unions offered the following self-serving statement about student activists across campuses: “They have forced the universities to move on this issue”. Nice try, Congressman Miller, but it’s all too obvious that you’ve employed students as pawns in a cause where Big Labor is struggling to keep textile jobs in the capital of apparel industry, California. I suppose too that you’ve taught these students the essence of NAFTA or have explained the crux of the very decision that North American clothing manufacturers and other corporations have relocated to overseas venues?
Did you explain to them why Levi Strauss is moving out of the country? Ah, that would be self-defeating, right?

“But many in the education community are questioning whether the wave of anti-sweatshop protest is an indigenous resurgence of campus activism or the handiwork of a powerful outside agitator–organized labor. Since he took over the AFL-CIO in 1995, John Sweeney has brought labor’s cause to campus, pouring more than $3 million into internships and outreach programs meant to interest students in careers as union activists”

“Critics charge that unions–in particular the influential Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees–continue to call the shots. ‘The students are vocal, but it’s hard to get a viewpoint from them that doesn’t reflect that of UNITE,'” says Allan Ryan, a Harvard University lawyer who has negotiated with anti-sweatshop protesters. Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, asks: “How much of this student interest is really being influenced by unions whose main goal is to try to bring these jobs back to the United States?”

Student activism in so far as overseas sweatshops are concerned is analogous to a high powered motor boat set out into the open ocean with its rudder removed from the outset. It would be acceptable if in their quest to impose their undefined perception of justice is in fact supported by economic substitutes to ensure that employees in places like the Dominican Republic have something concrete to fall back on when they lose their jobs as a result of an aimless and clueless cause on the part of student activists across campuses in the US mainland.

Perhaps, student activists can begin their quest for justice by first visiting the thousands of sweatshops between California and New York. Let’s see your sense of commitment put to the task of first cleaning your own backyard. And while at it, ask Congressman Miller and human rights groups to pitch-in too. What did they say about people who live in glass houses? It’s back to basics, friends.