LSU students form group to fight sweatshop labor

A small group of university students laid the foundation Thursday for the creation of an LSU affiliate of United Students Against Sweatshops, The Daily Reveille reports. National and regional organizers informed students of the role they play in the global supply chain of collegiate apparel. United Students Against Sweatshops’ national organizer Teresa Cheng described her organization’s recent campaign against Nike’s treatment of factory workers in Honduras as a concrete example of USAS’s meeting its core goals. USAS groups at the University of Wisconsin and Cornell University, among others, collaborated with the Workers Rights Consortium and laid-off factory workers to create a “sandwich of pressure” on the administration of their universities, Cheng tells the student newspaper. Wisconsin and Cornell USAS groups both succeeded in ending their schools’ product-licensing contracts with Nike, she says. The students in attendance Thursday resolved that their first major goal is to motivate the the LSU administration to reaffiliate with the Workers Rights Consortium, the only independent factory monitor directly accountable to universities. Read the full story here.