Here's the reality so many can't see. Activist, idealistic students are in motion once again, seized of a morally compelling cause. Their target, amazingly, is nothing less than the global corporation. They are challenging the conservative free-trade agenda that dominates both major political parties. Already, they are forcing global companies such as Nike to scramble for cover. They've only just begun.

The most vital part of this growing movement is, perhaps, the least noticed. On more than 175 campuses, students are calling global corporations to account for their exploitation of workers abroad. They are mounting demonstrations, hunger strikes, seizing administration buildings, confronting university trustees and administrators, and getting arrested by the dozens in nonviolent protests. The two-person staff of the coordinating group, United Students Against Sweatshops, can't keep up with the e-mail from students seeking to get involved both here and abroad.

This movement is less than four years old. Its roots trace back to 1996, when human-rights advocate Charles Kernaghan focused national attention on Honduran sweatshops in which young women worked at poverty wages, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, to sew clothes for a Kathie Lee Gifford fashion line. That summer, hundreds of university students joined worker struggles in this country as part of the AFL-CIO's Union Summer. Since then, groups of students have visited Central America to witness how women their own age work and live.

The students had a compelling moral argument: Let's not support companies that profit from exploiting workers abroad--and they acted on it. They targeted university apparel shops that buy logo clothing from global corporations with factories in Honduras, Indonesia and China, where worker rights are trampled. The $2.5-billion collegiate retail-apparel industry represents just 1% of the U.S. apparel market but is key to the youth market. So students started calling for their universities to enforce a code of conduct on suppliers.

University administrators didn't need the hassle but had no ready response for the students. The companies realized they were in trouble. Nike's swoosh symbol started being associated less with Michael Jordan than with impoverished young women abroad. Nike and others circled the wagons, enlisting a few human-rights groups to form the Fair Labor Assn., establishing their own code of conduct with the companies in control. Company-paid consultants did inspections, with factories notified ahead of time. Reports were kept private while the company "remedied" any problem. The Clinton administration pumped money into the operation. Relieved university administrators signed up.

But the students weren't buying. As Marikah Mancini, a graduate student at Purdue, said, "The basic question was whether you were empowering the companies or the workers." The result of the FLA, Sarah Jacobson of the University of Oregon argued, "would be to hide, not expose sweatshop conditions." The students insisted that any code of conduct include protections for the rights of women and workers, require a living wage and ban production from countries where workers had no right to organize. Most important, the students demanded that companies disclose the location of all factories. This would allow local church and human-rights groups to do independent monitoring. Nike and others refused.

So the students organized a Worker Rights Consortium to monitor company practices, financed by 1% of the revenues produced by university garment sales. It would sponsor independent monitoring by local human-rights groups and make their findings public.

When university administrators resisted, the students upped the ante. At the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere, students took over administration buildings. At Purdue, students camped out on the square, with several risking an 11-day hunger strike. At the University of Wisconsin, Eric Brakken was told he didn't have the student body's support. So he ran for student-government chairman on a no-sweatshops platform and won. Even at the University of Oregon, next door to Nike's corporate headquarters, students took over the president's office until he agreed to join the WRC.

Last year, facing suspension of contracts with Duke and other universities, Nike blinked and disclosed its factory locations. The other companies soon followed suit. Forty-four universities have now joined the WRC, including six Big 10 universities, Brown, Columbia and Georgetown. Two weeks ago, the entire University of California system signed up, issuing a code of conduct that demands a living wage of all contractors.

The students have identified an issue--the spread of sweatshop labor--that cuts through the cant about free trade. They have found the leverage to move not just their campuses, but global corporations--and maybe even the entire debate about globalization. They are directly challenging the laissez-faire assumptions of the last quarter-century, demanding corporations be held to some basic moral standards of conduct. Their focus on global corporations enlists the energies of many student passions, from the environmentalists to pro-Tibetan activists. And unlike the antiwar movement in the 1960s that was confronted by "hard hats," the SAS is forging links between students and workers, and between the environment and worker rights.

As President Bill Clinton and anyone active in the 1960s understands, when students are aroused about a moral issue, they can change the direction of the country. Already, even pundits who disparage the demonstrators have begun to accept that worker rights and the environment, food and workplace safety can no longer be ignored in the global market.

But the students are making the larger connections. Last week, SAS activists gathered in Washington for the march against the World Bank and IMF, arguing that their "structural adjustment programs," in the words of Erica Hiegelke, Smith College freshman, "press governments to attract Western investment by denying workers fundamental, internationally recognized rights."

These are not Neanderthal protectionists, nor bored kids looking for something to do. This student movement is internationalist, passionate and on the rise. And it is raising questions that might well mark the end of the conservative era of the last quarter-century.

Robert L. Borosage Is a Founder of the Campaign for America's Future

Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times

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