Campus in a Sweat

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 26, 2000 | by Michael Rust

College students at the University of Oregon protesting `sweatshop conditions' at Nike plants abroad found that Nike's CEO had his own way to protest.

Johnson Hall, home to the executive administrators of the University of Oregon, can be seen in the opening frames of the 1978 classic comedy, Animal House. This April the venerable building was host to hijinks of a different sort as protesters, for more than a week, surrounded the building and loudly called for university president David Frohnmayer to agree to their demands.

By no means was this an unusual occurrence for denizens of this campus community. For more than 30 years the university and the community around it in Eugene, Ore., have been hotbeds of political activism. Opposition to nuclear power, disinvestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa, nuclear disarmament, support for leftist movements in Latin America -- all loudly have been advocated during the last three decades from the steps of Johnson Hall.

But there was a special twist to April's protests. This time the demonstrations centered on whether the university would join the Worker Rights Consortium, or WRC, a grouping of colleges opposed to investment in enterprises using sweatshop labor. Ten or 20 years ago, many Eugene protesters supporting a nuclear freeze or marching for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua likely would have been wearing Nike sports apparel. After all, Nike was the intellectual offspring of the late Bill Bowerman, for 24 years a legendary track coach at the university. This time, however, the demonstrators were calling for measures strenuously opposed by the international sports-apparel conglomerate.

Within days of the event, Nike cofounder and chief executive officer Philip Knight launched a protest of his own. Indeed, for once, heated campus protests resulted in a freezing gust of cold air from the world beyond the campus when Knight announced that he was withdrawing $30 million from a development project for Autzen Stadium, the campus' football complex. During the years, alumnus Knight had given approximately $60 million to Oregon -- $30 million for academics and $30 million for athletics. The main library was named for him after he paid for extensive repairs and expansion, while the new law-school building is named for his father. What's more, the university's athletic programs long had enjoyed comfortable -- indeed lucrative -- relations with Nike, including deals for equipment and clothing.

Knight's action definitely brought the revolution home for students at the university. "I would say up until Phil Knight pulled his money out, interest was minimal, except for just the spectacle -- walking out of class and seeing everybody up there on the steps [of Johnson Hall]," says William Beutler, editor of the Oregon Commentator, the long-established alternative conservative student publication on campus. "It was a mild amusement."

However, Beutler tells Insight, when Knight pulled his tens of millions out of the stadium project "it really hit home to people that this was a serious issue. Until he pulled out the money, I don't think people cared; once he did, it was a big issue" and the whole campus chose up sides.

The object of the protest, remember, was insistence on membership in the WRC -- which is meant to replace the Fair Labor Alliance, or FLA, a consortium sponsored by the apparel industry to monitor worker conditions. Activists objected to the FLA and its code of conduct because of its industry connections. WRC members require their apparel licensees to comply with a stringent code of conduct that includes guarantee of a "living wage" for workers and the right to organize unions. The industry is given no role in governance, with control instead going to a board consisting of administrators, students and activists. This assuredly is not a table of organization likely to endear the group to entrepreneurs and corporations trying to take advantage of a lower wage scale in developing countries. Critics have pointed out that the WRC is not required to submit itself to any kind of scrutiny.

Reports from Eugene indicate that university administrators were leaning toward joining the FLA, but a committee of students and faculty -- organized in the summer when most students were gone -- called for participation in the alternative WRC, which excluded business. During student elections, a 1,237-404 vote on a campus with more than 16,000 students endorsed the WRC.

An irony apparent to both protesters and the industry is bound to make university administrators nervous. Knight has said that University of Oregon President Frohnmayer should be asked "if he will sign a pledge that all contracts and subcontractors of the University of Oregon, as well as the university itself, meet the WRC's `living-wage' provision." Indeed, Knight argues that "no university ... can meet the WRC `living-wage' and other code standards for food-service employees, groundskeepers, clerical personnel or teaching assistants."