INSIDE TRACK: Professors take on campus protesters
US academics are in conflict with student anti-sweatshop activists, writes Nancy Dunne
US college campuses are hardly the cauldrons of revolt that they were in the 1960s. However, one issue has stirred thousands of students preparing for their places in the "new economy": the plight of foreign factory workers who toil in unhealthy conditions for minuscule wages.
Students in the national Anti-Sweatshop Movement have urged - and sometimes demanded - that universities adopt codes of conduct for the companies they license to supply products bearing their logos. The Dollars 2.5bn (Pounds 1.7bn) school-logo market yields universities millions of dollars a year in licensing fees.
But many of the country's most prominent economic professors are now taking on the student activists. A letter signed by more than 250 academics has been sent to 535 college presidents warning them not to be pressured into making hasty decisions about the conditions they impose on licensees.
"We often encounter news reports of sit-ins by groups of students in the offices of university/college administrators, after which decisions are often made without seeing the view of scholars in the social sciences, law and humanities," the letter says. "Little attention has been given to whether the views of the Anti-Sweatshop campaign are representative of the views of governments, non-government organisations and workers in the poor countries."
The letter was sponsored by the Academic Consortium on International Trade, a group of pro-trade academic economists and lawyers. Acit was first proposed by Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia Unversity after thousands of protesters disrupted the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle. The professors recognise the students' "good intentions", but their letter contends that they "ignore the well-established fact that multinational corporations commonly pay their workers more on average, in comparison to the prevailing market wage for similar workers employed elsewhere in the economy". If multinationals were forced to pay even more, "the net results would be shifts in employment that will worsen the collective welfare of the very workers in poor countries who are supposed to be helped".
The student protesters and the economists seem to talk past each other and suspect each other's motives. The economists think that the students are tools of the unions. The students suspect the economists are in the pay of the multinationals.
"Some students are motivated by ethical and moral issues. That's absolutely good," says Aravind Panagariya, a University of Maryland professor who serves on the Acit steering committee. "At the same time, being captured by the protectionist interests is something else."
Jeff Ballinger, a Harvard researcher who was a labour activist in Asia, says the letter had "an arrogant tone that only these economists know what's going on with developing countries. They are just flat-out wrong in some cases. You always hear that foreign investors pay their workers more; it is just not true".
Eric Brakken, a representative of the Workers' Rights Consortium, which more than 50 colleges have joined, says although the group receives some union support, it is not protectionist.
He says the WRC is setting up its own monitoring group because it does not trust the audit firms who most often serve as factory watchdogs. He points to a recent study, released last week by Dara O'Rourke, an MIT professor who has inspected factories for the World Bank and the United Nations.
Mr O'Rourke accompanied PwC auditors on a recent tour of Asian sweatshops. His presence, at the insistence of Harvard students, provided the first opportunity for anyone to audit the auditors. Last week, Mr O'Rourke said the inspectors had overlooked health and safety violations, and "glossed over issues of freedom of association and other rights in the codes of conduct adopted by the universities".
Mr Bhagwati says the codes of conduct for companies should include denunciations of protectionism. He thinks emphasis should be placed on workers' dignity, and not just workers' pay. "When in Rome, don't do what the Romans do."