Beginnings of the GSC: 1997-1999
An Essay by Andrew Milmore, COL ‘01
I’m sitting down to record my piece of the history of the Georgetown Solidarity Committee, and I realize that I can’t remember many of the dates. Pretty funny for a history major. I hope the gist of it will suffice, and please forgive the personal bias contained herein, as unavoidably this is the history of GSC as I saw it.
The Beginnings: 1997-1998
Ben Smith (MSB ‘99) and Laura McSpedon (COL ‘00) can better describe how the Committee disappeared — after the failed cafeteria worker organizing campaign — and then re-formed itself around the nucleus of three AFL-CIO Union Summer alumni: Laura McSpedon (then a wee sophomore), Mike Burns (COL ‘98), and Gabe Kramer (SFS ‘98). When I first became aware of the GSC’s existence, it seemed that it had no history, nor exact direction, but had energy and personality to spare.
The GSC, then a non-recognized club of barely three members, had a table at the Fall 1997 SAC Fair. The only first-year student that I know of who joined because of that was Deborah Sabat, who very shortly thereafter was elected Vice-President of the club.
I remember seeing a flier a week or two later for an open general meeting. The meeting was held in one of those tiny second-floor ICC classrooms, and I attended it not really knowing what to expect. It was bizarre. There were about seven people there, I think, including me. Gabe kept referring to Patrick Dillon (’98), who was then the “treasurer,” as “the Knife of the Revolution.” Mike and Gabe acted out a short semi-scripted play about some janitors who agreed to meet with a union organizer, despite the formal and informal pressures against them. During the “discussion period” immediately following the performance, Pierre (’98) enthusiastically offered his analysis of the fine drama we had just witnessed, in addition to the current climate for labor organization in the United States.
Finally, somebody started discussing the Guess jeans campaign, which was something concrete we could do on campus. It was one of the first national anti-sweatshop campaigns ever, and later that year Rage Against the Machine endorsed the cause. Anyway, our plan was to buy a pair of Guess jeans (in a thrift store, of course), sit in Red Square, have people write whatever they wanted on it, and then mail the jeans to Guess corporate headquarters. That the plan succeeded was due almost entirely to the campus prominence of Gabe and Mike, in my opinion.
As the year progressed, the GSC dabbled in a variety of labor-related activities. There were spaghetti dinners at Gabe’s place, featuring guests from the United Fruit Workers, UNITE, and other groups. At one point Gabe seriously proposed that we each dress up as our favorite labor leader from history and parade around campus. Luckily, that plan never quite came together. We had discussion meetings at Laura’s apartment (Village A B104) and tabled periodically to distribute various leaflets. There were a few store protests, including at Fresh Fields on Wisconsin Ave. and Guess outlets at a couple of malls.
Possibly apocryphal interjection: legend has it that Gabe Kramer, honorary member of the South African Communist Party, and Ben Smith, a business student who then hesitated to be labeled as a “liberal,” attended a protest together at the Georgetown Park Mall sometime in the late fall or early spring. The M Street entrance to the mall is set back from the sidewalk, and the action was taking place on the covered patio area between the public sidewalk and the doors. The police arrived and got to work right away interfering with the right of assembly, handcuffing people and carrying them away. In a mixture of fear and cleverness, Ben and Gabe jumped onto a manhole cover within the patio area, clinging together and telling the police that they were technically on public property and thus protected in their speech. It worked.
Laura had interned at UNITE in New York City, and had the inside scoop on the new “sweat-free campus” campaign. We often talked about how wrong it would be if Georgetown goods were made in conditions that we vaguely understood to be terrible. But at first there wasn’t a whole lot we could do. We had no proof and very little idea of what the solution (apart from worker organization) would be. From UNITE we received the suggestion to look on the tags of all the Georgetown clothing we could find, and then make a record of the price, brand name, country of origin, and garment number (”RN#”) of the products. I guess UNITE had some sort of database that could trace the RNs to specific factories. Either that or they wanted to create a database. Anyway, we got to work sometime in November 1997.
The very first “job” I ever had in the club was to catalog the clothes for sale in the Yates Pro Shop. Actually, it was myself and another first-year, Dominique Gonyer, who volunteered for the job. She was introduced to the GSC a few weeks earlier when Michael Moore (the guy who did “Roger&Me” and “TV Nation”) had given a talk on campus, when she struck up a conversation with Laura et al. in Gaston Hall after the event. So the GSC did the research and started talking up the campaign. Not much ever came of the RN project, but it was important for a few reasons: 1)simply reading the tags made us realize how global the apparel manufacturing industry is; 2)the first hints of an intercollegiate network of anti-sweatshop students emerged, as we began to share data and advice with students from Harvard, Duke, and Holy Cross; 3)it immanetized the link between campus reality and factory reality, between tangible products and abstract injustice, between our prices and their wages.
Another Solidarity classic: One day in early spring 1998, Laura and Mike were tabling in Red Square. Also in the Square that day was a right-wing off-campus group that offered mini courses in journalism, activism, and conservative ideology for college students. (I can’t remember the name of the group, but they’ve been here at least once a year for several years. They’re the ones who use the poster display with pictures of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher on one side, under the word “Yes!”, opposite the word “No!” with menacing pictures of Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton.) After a while, Mike sent over a note to the stuffy guy in a suit who was working their table. The note said something along the lines of “I’d like to get to know you better – I think you’re really cute. Let’s get together someplace quiet for coffee.” The suit guy read the note with curiosity and then looked toward the GSC table. Mike met his eyes with a wink and pursed his lips together as if blowing a kiss. Within minutes the right-wingers had packed up and fled.
Mid- to late spring 1998 was when the Georgetown anti-sweatshop campaign began in earnest. More and more information about conditions in Nike factories was becoming available, and so we began to state with more and more confidence that it was virtually certain Georgetown goods were being made in sweatshop conditions. The campus press began to register our presence. The Voice jumped right in and did a cover story: “The campaign to get G.U. OUT of the sweatshop business”.
The angle taken by the Hoya was a little more interesting. At some point in January or February, a couple of spectators at a Georgetown men’s basketball game walked along the edge of the court with a bedsheet banner, something to do with recent hostilities against Iraq. They were escorted out by police without much fuss. I was at the game, sitting in the front of the student section, and I remember wondering who they were and what exactly the sign said. That Friday in the Hoya sports section, there was a column on the main page that began “Members of the Georgetown Solidarity Committee disrupted the game by parading a banner …” etc. The rest of the column poked fun at protesters in general. I remember being startled when I read it, because I sure as hell didn’t remember us planning anything of that sort. Of course, the reporter was incorrect. So Mike Burns wrote a short and hilarious letter to the editor for the following Tuesday, in which he clarified that the GSC had nothing to do with the banner, condemned the sweatshop companies for their practices, and invited the Hoya sports staff to a “pizza party.” I’m pretty sure that the erring writer half-apologized in his next column.
By this time, the GSC had become an officially recognized club, though I’m not sure when we began to receive a budget allocation. Our SAC commissioner, who also happened to be Gabe’s roommate, reported that OSP considered us to be “the most active group on campus.” We started lobbying to get a meeting with the Administration, and we were strenuously ignored for months. Eventually someone from the President’s office took the time to call Laura and tell her to please stop sending them letters, that our letters were not being seen by Fr. O’Donovan or any of his close assistants, and that we should direct any further whining to the Office of the Dean of Students. It was the first acknowledgment from Healy Hall that we existed. We accelerated and amplified our efforts.
Our demands at that time seem really vague and small in hindsight. We wanted Georgetown to adopt a licensee Code of Conduct. Thoughts of enforcement and cooperation with other schools or institutions were still off in the distance. We did, however, have some ideas about what the Code should contain, and by April we had produced a model Code of Conduct to stimulate discussion. If this sounds like a feeble campaign by today’s standards, it should be recalled that it was a different world then. Apart from the Kathie Lee scandal a few years earlier, companies had never conceded in the public dialogue that sweatshop conditions existed on a system-wide scale, let alone that they were ethically responsible for the behavior of their subcontractors. For us to argue that the University could, should, and had a responsibility to address these problems struck many people as an insane or amazingly novel idea.
The breakthroughs came in April. UNITE was sponsoring the first college-oriented worker tour. The union had stumbled more or less by accident across a Korean-owned apparel factory in the Dominican Republic called BJ&B. This large factory complex, with about two thousand employees, manufactured baseball caps for Champion, Nike, Gear for Sports, and several other major collegiate licensees. What’s more, BJ&B offered incontrovertible proof that goods featuring the logos of major American colleges – Harvard, Princeton, Duke, Brown, and Georgetown, to name just a few – were being sewn in sweatshop conditions. What exactly were the “sweatshop conditions”? Well, UNITE obtained the official factory document that specified the unequal pay scales for male and female employees, which was illegal by Dominican and international labor law. Paystubs indicated that workers putting in over 75 hours a week were earning a little less than one-third of what the Dominican government considered to be sufficient for “the most basic life necessities.” Investigations inside the factory revealed rancid drinking water, locked bathrooms, sweltering conditions, and worker intimidation. Most important of all, we got the testimony of two workers who were fired for speaking up in favor of a union: Kenia Rodriguez and Roselio Reyes. Both were college-aged, which added weight to their words for student audiences in the United States. They told of how BJ&B owned the newspapers in their towns, how they had been branded as dangerous and criminal, and how their families had been threatened. In one sentence, five-foot tall Kenia could say “I sewed this Georgetown baseball cap.” In the next sentence, just as truthfully, she could tell how all the workers had to line up at 6:00am each day and scream in unison, “I am not a human being – I am an animal!”
It was heartbreaking, appalling, and enraging to see these workers and hear their stories. I still think about them, and what it must have been like to travel all of a sudden to the United States and pass the truth on to crowds of students and the media. How cowardly for the schools not to be honest and firm with the companies! How cowardly of us not to stand up and make the truth heard! The chain of consent that held the sweatshop system together was beginning to break. Now we had our proof. I can’t emphasize enough how pivotal the 1998 BJ&B worker tour was. Maybe it’s just because I was an impressionable freshman at the time, but I really think that the movement started moving that very month.
A Campus Campaign and a National Movement: 1998-1999
When the day of the Georgetown worker visit arrived, our publicity had gone pretty well. A few of us made announcements in classes, contacted professors we thought would be interested, and hung up fliers. Somehow we paid for a little stage and a sound system for Red Square. GSC members circulated in the crowd and distributed copies of the full BJ&B report (courtesy of UNITE) and info about the GSC. Gabe made a short speech, then the workers had their say via translators. The last speaker was a G.U. Administration representative; I think it was then-Associate Dean of Students Penny Rue. She read a statement declaring Georgetown’s commitment to ethical business conduct, and its willingness to work with the GSC and with other schools to develop a “strong” and uniform Code of Conduct through the Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC). However, she explicitly added, if the Code being composed by the CLC was judged by Georgetown to be insufficient, Georgetown would pursue other, independent efforts to ensure fair conditions for workers like Kenia and Roselio. This last statement was crucial, and we got it on videotape.
Within days of that speech, the Administration was already abandoning its promise, by keeping students out of the loop and endlessly repeating that it was more important to stay with the group than to go for justice alone. The Code hadn’t even begun to be written yet, and they were already trying to placate us and blame all the other schools for the lack of strong measures in the Code! On the brighter side, the worker tour got us our first meetings with the Administration, after months of trying. The workers themselves, along with Laura, met with then-Vice-President Jack DeGioia, who was genuinely concerned and receptive. (The GSC has never gotten a meeting with him since.)
Side notes about the worker visit: after the speeches were done, we told the crowd that they could sign a petition for the Administration, sign up for more info about the GSC, and donate money for Kenia and Roselio’s college education in the Dominican Republic. The response nearly brought tears to my eyes. Students, staff, professors, and even Deans from inside the ICC lined up to sign. Among them were Deans Pinkard and Roemelmeyer from SFS, plus legendary SFS Badass Prof. Charles Pirtle (hardly a bleeding-heart liberal). As for the money, in roughly five minutes well over $200 was collected. One person, we later discovered, had wrapped a $100 bill inside a $1 bill and tossed it into the collection tray. Several months later, when I wrote a Viewpoint for the Hoya regarding the potential for student activism at Georgetown, I cited these incidents as hopeful signs.
And so the GSC’s long and troubled relationship with the Administration began, in April 1998. Meetings occurred very regularly, sometimes twice a week, between a few of us and a few of them. Typically, the meetings included Dean Donahue from Student Affairs; Joe Lang, chairman of the Athletic Dept.; Brian McGuire, director of Sports Promotions and Licensing; Dominique Gonyer, the GSC Secretary/Treasurer; Deborah Sabat (COL ‘01), GSC VP; myself, and Laura McSpedon, who was then the GSC Campaign Director. The GSC’s seniors — including Mike, Gabe, Pierre, Neil Watkins, Chad Dechant, and others — deliberately stayed away from these meetings. They said that they wanted the younger members to take the lead. This was a wise strategy and the GSC still employs it today.
“Outside” activities in the Spring of 1998 included heavy tabling, bake sales (called “Evil Bake Sales” for reasons unknown), and the “Evil Reception” on Parent’s Weekend. Our Reception took place one evening in Red Square during the official reception inside the ICC Galleria. The GSC set up a nice-looking table with fancy-looking hors d’oeurves and polite-looking propaganda. We had a few students playing musical instruments, including Dominique Gonyer on the flute, and everybody was dressed up semi-formally. Parents lined up to eat our cheese and read our shocking facts about Georgetown’s cozy relationship with sweatshop exploiters. Inside the Galleria, we witnessed a bunch of parents approaching Fr. O’Donovan, facts in hand, questioning Georgetown’s intentions and disturbing the general air of contented denial. It was one of the club’s most successful actions ever.
“Inside” activities that same semester were very basic. Using the model Code of Conduct developed by the GSC, the ad hoc committee discussed the basic points of the anti-sweatshop movement (e.g. right to organize, public disclosure of factory locations and monitoring reports, living wage, etc.). Ongoing events in the national scene were also discussed: in particular, Duke University’s pioneering Code of Conduct was picked over, and plans were made for Georgetown’s participation in the anticipated CLC Task Force of major collegiate licensors. Initially, the Solidarity Committee (like student groups around the country) was hopeful for and supportive of the move toward a uniform Code of Conduct. There was a lot of talk about creating an economic incentive for fair conditions, i.e. that it would be cheaper for owners to pay workers more and clean up the factories than to sacrifice a share in the collegiate apparel market.
The summer of 1998 was significant for two reasons. First, it became apparent that college administrators, including Georgetown’s own, were not going to allow students or anti-sweatshop representatives to participate in forming the Code. (By contrast, Nike and other companies were invited in the late stages of the document to edit and contest the content of the Code that would supposedly empower their workers.) Meetings of school licensing directors and CLC lawyers were held in July and August, at least one of which in Atlanta at CLC headquarters. Students and union members from the Atlanta area were right outside, physically and symbolically. They leafletted the car windshields of all the licensing directors — with a little passive assistance from the parking lot security guards, who listened to the students and expressed their solidarity with the workers’ cause.
Second, the United Students Against Sweatshops coalition was founded in New York City. The three “Founding Parents” were Dan Hennifeld from Harvard, Tico Almeida from Duke, and Georgetown’s own Laura McSpedon. At the founding conference, Georgetown was the most heavily represented school, with the possible exception of U-Wisconsin. Laura, Ben Smith (MSB ‘99), new alumnus Mike Burns, and myself all took part in the workshops and endless brainstorming sessions of the weekend. The conference took place in a shabby building right off Times Square, just blocks away from the Garment District sweatshops, in space leased by UNITE. There weren’t more than 35 delegates there in total.
Laura and Dan ran the conference; so she could probably give the best account of how it went and how it subsequently affected the GSC. For me, the most interesting parts of the conference were 1)accompanying a sweatshop worker to the shop to demand her overdue wages, 2)learning about the political economy of the global apparel industry, and thus glimpsing the structural roots of the problem, and 3)grilling the head of the CLC for more than two hours on the lack of student and labor input in the evolving Code of Conduct. I realized, we realized, that our arguments were stronger than theirs; and the only reason we weren’t “winning” yet was that the decision-makers simply avoided meetings with students. It was an inspiring weekend, in hindsight. At the time, I found the repetitiveness and slow progress of our discussions to be brain-numbing. Nevertheless, personal connections were made, the USAS listserv was established, and for the first time we recognized our own strength.
One piece of USAS trivia: one of the last votes we took at the conference was for the name of our new national organization. I was the one who proposed “United Students Against Sweatshops.” Support was lukewarm at best, but it passed. Immediately after the vote, Dan Hennifeld said, “Yeah, none of us are really happy with it, but let’s move on.” What an auspicious birth for the movement.
When we returned to campus in the fall, the Exec Board was as follows: President Ben Smith (MSB ‘99), Vice-President Deborah Sabat (COL ‘01), Campaign Director Laura McSpedon (COL ‘00), Chief Organizer Andrew Milmore (SFS ‘01), and Secretary-Treasurer Domnique Gonyer (FLL ‘01, transferred to Boston University in Fall ‘99). There were lots of active members from the class of 2001, including Olga Pierce (who later served as Vice-President), Luke Young, Jesse Driscoll, Ed Rosillo-Anaya, and others. The board was nervous about freshmen recruitment, because without the presence of Gabe Kramer, what would make us stand out from the others at SAC Fair?
As it turned out, there was no cause for worry: before SAC Fair even took place, we had at least one first-year student tabling for us — Cassandra Lyons (SFS ‘02), who later became Chief Organizer. At SAC Fair, the GSC’s display caught a lot of eyes and a lot of sign-ups. It was arranged like a game show, entitled “The Price Is Wrong!” There was a clothesline strung behind the table, featuring GU and other apparel hung up with tags indicating wages paid to the workers who made it. We also had lots of posters, pamphlets, and candy to give away. Perhaps most important of all, Ben Smith brought people to the GSC table non-stop. He was an RA in Harbin and well-liked by just about everyone who met him. One of his residents, who he forced to sign up, was Adam Smith (SFS ‘02). Before the year was out, Adam was Secretary-Treasurer, and still later he was voted Vice-President.
Meetings in the Fall of ‘98 routinely filled Healy classrooms. There was a lot of energy and a lot to get done. We resumed our meetings with Dean Donahue & Co., although the relationship was steadily turning bitter, as the CLC Code neared completion and we were denied even copies of the draft Code. Still, it became apparent that the Code was lacking almost all of the most essential elements. The GSC, along with USAS counterparts around the country, began to focus on three key criticisms: 1)the CLC Code had no provision for public disclosure of factory locations or monitoring reports — in fact, it stated that access to such information would be serverely restricted; 2)the CLC Code did not call for a living wage, or even recognize that substantial pay raises would be necessary in most cases — later, in response to this criticism, a footnote was added in vague support of a living wage study; 3)the Code contained an escape clause for all countries or regions “where law or practice conflict with the standards of this Code.” As Prof. Lance of the GU Philosophy Department later pointed out, if practice didn’t conflict with these standards, we wouldn’t need a Code in the first place! These three points were the focus of the GSC’s campaign, and the national campaign, for the entire 1998-1999 school year.
The GSC’s major action of the Fall semester used a 9-piece posterboard display to outline the sweatshop problem and GU’s place in it. Dean Steigman of SFS commented that it was the best informative display he had ever seen put together by a student group at this University. The display, along with the GSC table, spent a full week in Red Square. At the table, we had petition postcards for community members to sign. The postcards were addressed to Fr. O’Donovan; they requested that he agree not to endorse any Code of Conduct that did not at least include a living wage, full public disclosure, explicit protection of the right to organize, and “universal compliance” (in other words, no escape clauses). Not for the first time and not for the last time, we were overwhelmed by the response. By week’s end, more than 800 students, staff, and faculty members had visited the display, talked with GSC members at the table, and signed petition postcards.
The delivery of the petitions, on October 2, 1998, was even more impressive. The club reached out to more than 20 campus organization leaders to accompany GSC members into Healy Hall. The crowd of students, all well-dressed, first formed on the grass behind John Carroll’s statue and held up placards to spell out “LIVING WAGE” and “SOLIDARITY”. Then we marched up the steps to Fr. Donovan’s office, where we were met by his assistant Dan Porterfield. It was a truly powerful sight to see all the different campus leaders sitting together around the table in the Hall of Cardinals, surrounded by even more students and press. Laura McSpedon spoke on the students’ behalf, repeating over and over that Georgetown’s moral position could not allow it to endorse a fake solution to human misery, and that students and Administration should work together. Mr. Porterfield graciously accepted the petitions on Fr. O’Donovan’s behalf. We filed out, encouraged by the show of student unity, but wary of the Administration’s continued evasiveness.
To be continued …. !
