from The Badger Herald
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Group protests policies
by Doug Feingold
A group of 45 students protested outside University of Wisconsin Chancellor John Wiley’s office Wednesday afternoon and demanded an end to sweatshop labor in the production of UW apparel and merchandise.
The students chanted “Wiley” outside the chancellor’s office in Bascom Hall and held up signs and posters calling for an end to labor violations.
“The purpose of today’s march was to show students will not stand for the chancellor making excuses for sweatshop production and human-rights violations,” Liana Dalton, a junior serving on the UW Labor Licensing Policies Committee, said.
The LLPC is a special committee set up by the chancellor to advise him on labor-policy issues and suggest possible solutions for problems.
Protesters chanted and banged on Wiley’s door and windows for approximately 10 minutes. Some students taped their mouths shut to demonstrate Wiley’s silencing of student and worker voices.
“[T]he university has power,” Dalton said of UW being able to influence licensees’ policies.
UW Police arrived during the protest to monitor the situation but did not need to make any arrests. The group left peacefully on its own. No police intervention was required, according to a police report.
As the students left Bascom Hall, they chanted, “We’ll be back.” A few students continued to chant outside Bascom Hall after the majority of the protesters left but soon departed.
The chancellor’s office did not provide an immediate response regarding the protest, but a professor from a lecture across the hall asked the protesters to keep it down, since her class was taking a test.
The committee sent a letter to the chancellor in late February recommending all companies producing goods with a UW logo must disclose the volume of goods manufactured in a given factory. The committee also requested all companies to disclose the sum they pay to individual factories for each type of good manufactured there.
Wary of labor issues, the UW System Board of Regents passed a contract with adidas last Friday to provide UW with athletic equipment.
“We’ve negotiated the best deal, as far as I’m aware,” Wiley said at the meeting, calling bad labor practices and the availability of clothing made in such conditions “scandalous.”
According to Dalton, this contract approval pushed students to take action and protest at Bascom Hall. Dalton added some members of the LLPC wanted the contract to force the public disclosure of records because of concerns with the humanity of workers’ conditions.
Despite this, some have considered UW the leader in making labor issues a major concern in collegiate apparel. UW sponsored a conference investigating foreign garment-manufacturing policies in last March’s “The Labor Behind the Label.”
Wiley also gave his support to full wage disclosure in a series of LLPC meetings last January.
Special Assistant to the Chancellor LaMarr Billups calls UW a leader in labor activism, citing Western Michigan University as following in Madison’s footsteps.
“We have made major strides in these areas over the last several years, often with the important influence of students and industry leaders,” Billups said in a release.
— Matthew Dolbey contributed to this article.