Sitting in against sweatshops

Arizona Daily Wildcat

For late joiners, the issue is this: people who work in factories producing university licensed products - anything with a UA logo, name, or insignia - are subject to daily abuse. Their bosses beat them, sexually harass them, expose them without their knowledge to massive health risks, and fire anyone who exercises basic human rights.

American corporations do this. It is not because their CEOs are evil people, though certainly that's sometimes true. It's because corporations, unlike the United States, are authoritarian. And they're designed to be tirelessly devoted to the bottom line. This is not inevitable, and even if all else fails in this sit-in, the whole thing will have been a success if the UA campus learns that lesson well. The status quo is not inevitable, and it is not just.

One of the most bizarre developments of the sit-in has been the media's willingness to believe that "Potemkin Pete" Likins has already acceded to the demands with which we entered last week. A sit-in is disruptive; in a sense, that's the point. But the thing it disrupts the most is not the Administration. The thing it disrupts the most is the lives of the people who are sitting-in, all day every day. No one does this for fun.

And yet, somehow Potemkin Pete has managed to get some people - or maybe the press is more gullible than its readers - to believe that we're all just hanging out here on a lark. At least two of our number have lost their jobs. At least two have put themselves in serious danger of not graduating this spring. Who could believe this is a lark?

So what's the issue, then?

It's the same as it always was: We need credible enforcement. When we came in, ol' Potemkin said that what mattered was that he was satisfied with progress. Imagine Saddam Hussein saying: "I don't have any nukes, trust me." This was the position around which the entire campus rallied last week.

Now, Potemkin Pete tells us he's accepted deadlines for enforcement. But has he?

No. We asked for a responsible university committee that would guarantee enforcement. Without such a committee, all we have is ol' Potemkin saying, "Trust me." The Wildcat - easily the most objective paper in Tucson, sad to say - tells us that Pete will withdraw from the Fair Labor Association if he's not satisfied. But he won't. For him, "seek alternative means" allows him to ask his next door neighbor if there are any sweatshops in Indonesia. And it also allows him to stay in the FLA. In his words, he wants to "ride two horses."

Back in March, Students Against Sweatshops accused Potemkin Pete of talking a good game, but not playing one. It's still true. Indeed, he admitted, in closed-door negotiations, that his position now is in practice exactly the same as it was when we arrived last week. He has not budged. I guess the word "negotiations" is ill-chosen.

Catherine the Great, who ruled Russia so many years ago, had a plan to improve the lives of the serfs. She delegated her adviser, Potemkin, to do the job. Potemkin, though, embezzled all the money, and not a single serf lived a better life. Every once in awhile, Catherine would alert Potemkin that she wanted to visit "her" peasants, so Potemkin basically built a movie set: the picture of a happy town of happy serfs. It was false. So is Potemkin Pete.

We're staying.