On Tuesday night, twelve students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor were arrested after refusing to leave the office of the University's president (video of the arrests: 1, 2). The students, part of the campus group Students Organizing for Labor and Economic Equality (SOLE), held the sit-in following eight years of organizing on the University of Michigan campus around the issue of sweatshop labor. Following the arrests, activists at the University of Michigan are calling on supporters to call the University or to complete an email action demanding that the charges be dropped and that the University sign-on to the Designated Supplier Program.
The Designated Supplier Program (DSP)--the focal point of the sit-in at University of Michigan--is a "comprehensive program for enhancing the enforcement of university codes of conduct" that govern the conditions under which apparel bearing university logos are produced. The DSP is seen as the "next step" in anti-sweatshop organizing on college campuses and a necessary move to enhance "codes of conduct" that were won by local affiliates of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) in the early 2000s as it provides critical monitoring and enforcement capabilities designed to ensure that university licensed apparel is not made in sweatshops. The program has been supported by thirty colleges and universities around the United States, including West Michigan's Grand Valley State University (GVSU), as well as larger universities such as the University of Wisconsin Madison, Duke, and Indiana University.
At the University of Michigan, the University's administration has refused to support the DSP despite student support. Following a 51-hour sit-in in 2000, the University of Michigan adopted a "code of conduct" that guarantees workers producing university apparel freedom from harassment and discrimination, but has no system that ensures compliance. Beginning in 2005, activists with SOLE have argued that the DSP would monitor factories and assure adherence to the University's Code of Conduct. However, University President Mary Sue Coleman has refused to accept the DSP and sent the issue to the Labor Standards and Human Rights committee for investigation. The committee voted against adopting the DSP in April of 2006 but failed to provide an alternative measure despite concluding that current monitoring practices were insufficient. In March of this year, a Sweatfree Coalition-imposed deadline for adoption of the DSP was ignored without a response from University administrators, prompting the sit-in on Tuesday. Students argued that a second "report" by the committee to be released on April 20 would not make any substantive improvement in the conditions under which University apparel is made.
At the start of the sit-in, University President Mary Sue Coleman briefly told the students "we don't accept demands from students." Even as the sit-in progressed and received a considerable amount of media coverage (http://www.uofmsitin.com/press.html), President Coleman refused to discuss the issue with the students. The University did offer a meeting with an administrator named Gary Krenz and some other administrators, but that was it. According to the sit-in blog, the possible meeting was to be discussed Tuesday evening, but it is unclear as to whether or not the offer was accepted given the arrests.
