Duke signs CLC Code

DURHAM, N.C. - For members of Duke University's Students Against Sweatshops, the most important challenge of being locked in the Allen Building was trying to broadcast news of their 31-hour sit-in to the outside world. But upon vacating the premises Saturday night, they faced an even larger task: spreading news of their achievement.

By Monday morning - the scheduled deadline for signing the Collegiate Licensing Company's anti-sweatshop code - almost everyone involved in the apparel licensing debate knew about the compromise eked out by SAS and Duke administrators, and most were intrigued.

"The Duke agreement, from what I've heard, seems to be a balance between the two sides," said Casey Nagy, executive assistant to the provost at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Under the agreement, Duke will sign the CLC Code of Conduct. By joining the code, the 170 member schools would impose human rights standards on the licensed manufacturers producing goods bearing their logos. The licensees will be responsible for hiring monitoring agencies to check for compliance and report back to the CLC.

But this weekend's agreement insists on full disclosure: Companies must reveal their factory addresses to universities, who can notify students, who in turn can inform independent human rights groups. If the CLC code does not achieve full disclosure within a year, then the university must leave the group.

Even without considering the Duke agreement, administrators at most schools with vocal anti-sweatshop movements said they need more time to evaluate the code's strengths and weaknesses.

The University of Wisconsin, New York University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, are each still considering whether to sign.

The deadline "was certainly not feasible for NYU," said John Beckman, the school's director of public affairs. "We're a campus with a wide diversity of opinions and a campus in a city that has a sizable garment district, and there are a lot of voices on campus that we feel need to be heard."

Bill Battle, CLC's chief executive officer, said the company has received responses from fewer than half of the schools.

Trinity senior Tico Almeida, a founding member of the University's SAS, said he hopes other schools will use the Duke agreement as a model for compromise between activists and administrators.

Nagy said the agreement "certainly bears considering." But Beckman said he was not sure the compromise is progressive enough for his liberal campus.

"There are certainly some folks on the campus who feel that no code should be signed until the transparency issue has been addressed," he said. The Duke compromise "has been a matter of some discussion among my colleagues. But whether that will be something that's widely applicable to other universities, I'm not sure."

UNC-CH is only days away from a final proposal to Chancellor Michael Hooker, said Rut Tufts, director of auxiliary enterprises. Although its draft report is subject to change, he said it contains an 18-month trial period.

The CLC monitoring system will take six months to implement, Tufts said; the additional year would give UNC-CH ample time to assess the monitoring system. Battle said he was not sure how much time would be needed to bring the CLC code up to full public disclosure of factory addresses.

"What's most important to me is that the monitors get access to where the factories are located," he said. "I don't care if the disclosure is public."

But activists insist that hired monitors can be easily corrupted, and that open factory lists are the only way to allow for independent monitoring.

"Our goal is to move as fast as we can," Battle said, "but whether that's not fast enough for some student groups or if that's too fast for some manufacturers, I just don't know."

02-04-99