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Worker's rights are not a favor
To the editor, I read with interest Friday's Wildcat article on President Likins's support of an apparently new Nike code of conduct. I would like to bring to your notice several concerns that the article did not address. It has already been made fairly clear by Students Against Sweatshops members and others that the main issue is not whether "independent" monitors are permitted to inspect factories but rather what "independent" in this context means. If it is necessary to gain Nike's approval before a firm is permitted to inspect factories and report, then "independent" becomes a misnomer. This is especially the case since apparel firms such as Nike are funding these inspections. Whilst I realize that the UA might not be able to afford sending inspectors to overseas trips, it seems to me that a) co-operative efforts on the part of universities might be able to afford such expenses, and, b) in any case, insisting that companies spend money on ensuring labor practices (through both funding independent inspections and ameliorating labor conditions) is the least one should be able to expect from companies that never seem to cease to tout their own moral standing. Treating people, and particularly one's own employees, with dignity, and extending to them a larger share of the profits of their own work, hardly strikes me as some sort of benevolent favor. It is the basis of any co-operative social enterprise. Given current corporate and university rhetoric, in which any corporate fiscal commitment to improve the lot of workers is seen as a generous gesture worthy of gratitude, it is not difficult to see the relationship between Nike, for instance, and its workers, as antagonistic rather than cooperative in any sense. Ultimately, current debates on university apparel and labor issues have to do with the way people are treated. They have to do with social structures and relationships of power, in which the university has to recognize its responsibilities and participation. What the university then does about all this is where I believe the UA falls substantially short. President Likins has argued, in the past, that the university simply faces a particular corporate "reality" in which it has to do certain kinds of business that demands compromise. This is something that, (he has been cited in Friday's Wildcat as having said) students don't do well, hence our not being invited to participate on the Collegiate Licensing Co. Board. This is, of course, an astoundingly patronizing notion of "students" -Êhere figured as unreasonable idealists rather than serious thinkers or scholars in any sense -Êby the President. It is also a vision of the university as an acquiescent party to broader social processes rather than an engaged protagonist working toward progressive social change. Institutional "realities" facing the UA, and related "compromises," are not, however, the only, or even the most important ones in a larger perspective. It isn't as if laborers being beaten, raped, and paid poverty wages don't know the meaning of compromise. The purpose of establishing binding and effective Codes of Conduct is to make those compromises unnecessary, or at least less painful. And it is to make apparel companies and their well-paid executives take up their share of the burdens of "compromise." To suggest that this is only a matter between universities and apparel companies, and their common "reality," is to forget what, and whose compromises, are really at issue here. It is also to forget the larger global chains of compromises, realities, and responsibilities to which we all contribute, and which sustain us all.
Ari Singh Anand
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