The nearly three-year long struggle by GW students to pressure the University administration for a meaningful sweatshop policy has hit a temporary plateau with President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg’s most recent letter to the GW United Students Against Sweatshops. As The Hatchet has reported, students have fought for GW membership in the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent sweatshop verification agency representing over 80 universities. GW USAS views Trachtenberg’s refusal to join the WRC as an abdication of responsibility for the global sweatshop problem and a blatant disregard for the campus community.
The WRC uses the moral and financial power of U.S. universities and is the only tested independent means for verifying sweatshop conditions in factories that GW’s corporate-sponsored monitors have conveniently overlooked in other instances. It is the most effective lobby for cleaning up labor practices abroad while ensuring that factories do not pick up and leave at the first sign of regulatory attempts, thereby aiding a country’s economic development. Recently, in a Mexican factory making clothes for Georgetown University, the WRC uncovered extreme abuses of child labor and wages illegal under the Mexican constitution. The WRC brought the abuses to the attention of Nike, the Mexican government and the WRC’s member universities who then facilitated striking worker re-hires and a general clean up of the situation. The sweatshop problem, and the creation of a meaningful solution to it, is one of the greatest moral and political dilemmas of modern times. The WRC is a part of the solution.
In Trachtenberg’s explanation of his rejection of the WRC, he writes that the GW administration is “less inclined to be the joiners . we want to do our own thing as much as we can.” Furthermore, he makes claims that GW is anti-sweatshop and implies that the only reason he is unwilling to back up the claim with action is the $1,000 membership fee, which would undermine his “fiduciary responsibility.”
As GW USAS has repeatedly demonstrated, the ubiquity of sweatshop conditions in the global textile industry makes appeals to a “concerned independence” unrealistic and morally bankrupt. The vast majority of factories that GW and other schools use are unmonitored and hidden. Without independent verification of GW’s “anti-sweatshop” position is hollow. This is most evident by the administration’s inability to even find the list of its factory locations, which they promised they had over a month ago. Furthermore, the WRC fee is a fraction of what GW has paid ice-sculptors and chinchilla-handlers. We can look at even less extreme examples to see the lack of social priorities in GW’s spending.
In his decision, Trachtenberg rejects the wishes of thousands of student petition signatories and a unanimous Student Association resolution he recommended.
How long are GW students going to be kept out of major University decisions including campus and enrollment expansion, the freeze on new faculty hires and other policies that could make GW an active advocate for justice in the global economy? We sincerely hope GW students can rise to the challenge and question an administration motivated by glossy campus pictorials and meaningless cosmetic changes while refusing to take meaningful and inexpensive steps toward making our world a better place.
-The writers are both majoring in international affairs.