DAY SEVENTY NINE

In college, I worked extensively with a group called Students for Economic Jusice, a student activist group that worked for labor and human rights, and part of a national group called the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). In particular, the group aimed to get McPherson, the president of the university - who was also a member of Young Americans for Freedom - to join a certain group to monitor sweatshops.

As an aside, in its new iteration, MSU's YAF was identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as being a hate group - mentioning their actions against SEJ and MEXA (Movimiento Estudiantil Xican@ de Aztlan, particularly with their well-conceived "catch an illegal" day, where they planned to have people dress up in "Mexican" costumes and then rally the troups, chasing the folks throughout town, a Qur'an desecration day, bringing minuteman to campus and mocking a former Coke employee who had asylum due to threats being made against him (and friends killed) from attempting to unionize a Coke plant in Columbia. Brilliant. Read more about the group and winners involved here, and here.

I digress. McPherson - who wasn't all bad, but kinda was - was adamently opposed to Michigan State University adopting a certain code of coduct, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), which has much stronger labor oversight of sweatshops where university apparel is produced. Instead, the University stayed part of the Fair Labor Association, a group started and run by MNC companies with such partial companies as Nike, Reebok and Adidas, with no labor oversight whatsoever. There were severe problems with the FLA, for sure. Eventually, after years of work, the University joined the WRC. Sadly, it probably had more to do with when McPherson left MSU to go fiddle with Iraq's economy than our protests - but, because we had to do actions for so much longer than most universities, we got out of the same ole boring sweatshop fashion show or dye-ins to other actions, like a snow 'thing' [ED. LOOK! JIM WROTE A CHAPTER AND I'M IN IT!], a chill-in, flash dance for justice, keg stands (root beer) for justice, and a whole lot more laid out in this document under creative tactics.

Cut to today, where people on facebook are sending around a number of articles tracing the last two weeks of one worker creating Apple iPads. Lai Xiaodong, 22, moved to Chengdu to work for $22 a day. Though Apple has a code of conduct for suppliers, laying out certain rights, including working 60 hours or less a week and prohibiting child labor, its own progress report indicated there were numerous issues with compliance. Lai was killed in a factory explosion that burned 90% of his body, but he didn't die immediately, taking two days to finally succumb. This came after an advocacy group warned Apple of the abuses and dangers in its plants. Foxconn, the company that became well known a few years back for its astounding rate of employee suicide, wired his family a check for $150,000.

To show how serious it is about stopping labor abuses, Apple has made a big production about joining the FLA - which, as you know from above, may be better than nothing but is viewed suspiciously by watchdog groups as being a way to appease the public while not really solving labor abuses. Is it a coincidence that Apple is highly publicizing its movement to join the FLA at this time - a time when the public is more focused on its labor rights violations than before?

Turns out that Labor Notes also wrote an article about the current developments at Apple. The conclusion is, for me, inevitable: "In sum, Apple is now doing what Nike has been doing for nearly 15 years: the apology-plus-transparency formula, straight out of the manuals offered by “reputation management” consultants."

Seems to me like SACOM (Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior) would be a better watchdog group. SACOM - the group that released a report highlighting factory problems in Lai's factory a mere two weeks before his death - has extensive experience working with Foxconn and other electronics sweatshops. Here's hoping that Apple joining the FLA doesn't distract the public, and that actual change will be possible.