No Sweat! to march today

Almost every Hoosier student owns something bearing the IU logo, but few probably give any consideration to how these items are made. It's doubtful many are familiar with IU's licensing policies or know how much the worker who made their T-shirt was paid.\nIU's No Sweat! student activist group hopes to bring these issues to the forefront today with a campus march and protest to launch its "Open the Books!" campaign.\nNo Sweat! has aligned with other Big Ten and East Coast student groups, along with IU's Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance and Progressive Faculty Coalition, to initiate a nationwide movement for fair wages in the collegiate apparel industry. \nThe group will march through campus beginning at 3:15 p.m. at Woodburn Hall and ending at Dunn Meadow, where a large-scale account ledger will be smashed open by student activists. \nJunior No Sweat! member Brent Gutmann said the opening of the ledger is meant to symbolically represent a demand for the full disclosure of wages and working conditions.\nSpecifically, No Sweat! is demanding all apparel manufacturers licensed to print the IU logo open their ledgers and disclose what they pay their workers, Gutmann said.\nJudi Nitsch, a fourth-year graduate student in No Sweat!, said wage disclosure is a small but significant step in the fight against wage-related abuses around the world.\n"Minimum wage violations are standard practice at apparel industry sweatshops across the globe -- from El Salvador, Mexico and the United States to China, Indonesia and Bangladesh," Nitsch said.\nIU established a sweatshop advisory committee in 2000 to oversee University relations with the Workers Rights Consortium, a non-governmental organization based in Washington, D.C., that "assist[s] in the enforcement of manufacturing Codes of Conduct adopted by colleges and universities … to ensure that factories producing clothing and other goods bearing college and university names respect the basic rights of workers," according to its Web site (www.workersrights.org).\nNitsch said No Sweat! has been working with the committee for more than a year to extend IU's Code to include measures that would ensure the full disclosure of specific wage information.\n"We are asking our administration to commit to getting wage disclosure from our licensees by adding a wage disclosure clause to our codes of conduct," said No Sweat! member David Woken, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate.\nGutmann, who has been involved with No Sweat! for more than two years, said the disclosure of wages would provide data necessary to guarantee the University is complying with fair labor practices.\n"We have no intention of making the factories change these wages," Gutmann said. "As a policy, No Sweat! doesn't take on campaigns to push for better working conditions unless the factory workers contact us to do so. Our campaigns take place strictly when the workers ask us to intervene."\nNo Sweat! was founded at IU in 1998 and is an affiliate of the United Students Against Sweatshops, a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to protecting and extending workers' rights locally, nationally and internationally.\nToday's campaign will be held in conjunction with USAS members at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan.\nThe three universities involved in the protest have coordinated their actions to smash the symbolic lock on the account ledgers at 3:30 p.m. and open the wage practices of the apparel industry to the world.\nThe campaign will commemorate the anniversary of a 1912 textile workers' strike in Lowell, Mass.\nGutmann said because No Sweat! has not taken a very visible role on campus in recent years, he is anxious to spread its message to the community. \n"I'm excited to be doing something public now -- to get out, speak up and yell and scream and attract attention to our cause," he said. "I really care about these issues. This is something that really makes me feel like I have the power to make a difference, and I'm actually doing something to make the world a better place."\nGutmann emphasized he wants students to realize the importance of fair labor conditions.\n"I think that people really don't encounter these issues on a day-to-day basis," he said. "We're dealing with things that seem really abstract-happening in places that are foreign to us, but there's also stuff going on right here at IU. These are things that definitely affect all our lives. The situation of labor directly impacts the welfare of us all."\n-- Contact staff writer Andrea Minarcek at aminarce@indiana.edu.