RYAN HAGEN
News Assistant
Convocation proved unusually controversial Monday, as Stauffer Chapel filled with students passionately supporting or opposing anti-sweatshops activist Jim Keady’s message on sweatshops.
Some students quietly filed out as the presentation, “Behind the Swoosh: Sweatshops and Social Justice,” ended. But benches remained crowded two hours after Convo began, as students—voices sometimes raised—challenged Keady’s plan or asked for more information.
About 20 students crowded around him after being scanned out, and a group of six, evenly split between support and opposition, spent nearly three hours in the chapel.
“I always try to welcome controversy,” said senior Brandon Reilly, who represents the social action initiative to the SGA. “I think it went great.”
As part of an effort to bring social awareness to campus, Reilly proposed the SGA include the presentation.
Keady has given a version of the speech, which asked students to take action to change Nike’s labor practices at 250 high schools and colleges. He said he often encounters opposition but remains committed to improving the situation of sweatshop workers.
“They’re not just cogs in the machinery of production,” Keady said. “They’re children of God.”
Keady spent a month in a slum for factory workers in Indonesia, saying he wanted to see the situation firsthand and combat the misconception that workers live comfortably on Nike wages.
He lived alongside them, spending $1.25 each day, the spending power of the highest paid factory laborers.
“We lived in a 9 by 9 cement box with no furniture,” he said. “We slept on a thin mat placed on top of a concrete floor.”
He said he was able to buy two meals of rice and meat, often worm-infested, each day. “There’s no way you can live on $1.25 a day and maintain your human dignity,” he said after returning to the United States weakened and 25 pounds lighter.
Students should educate themselves on this issue, he said, then write their Congressman or Nike to demand that Nike disclose wage rates and provide a living wage for its workers.
Many students called this impractical and an endorsement of communism.
“I don’t think it’s the U.S.’s role to make everyone in the world equal,” said sophomore Blake Blardy. “At the end he seemed to be leaning toward socialism/communism, but I think nearly everyone at the school would agree they’d be happier with capitalism. That’s how we got to where we are today.”
Keady classified himself a liberation theologian, a doctrine sometimes explained as Christian socialism. “The Apostles put everything in common, and no one was in want,” he said.
When a student presented the Soviet Union as proof communism wouldn’t work, he said that country practiced totalitarianism, not communism. “Still, I think we need a new ‘ism,’” he said.
Sophomore Jay Harrington disagreed with the presentation for several reasons. “We have different laws and a different situation in the U.S.” he said. “And when he said he wasn’t a capitalist, that made me kind of unhappy — it’s going against the American way.”
Others supported his message, but with reservations.
“He was a great speaker, very knowledgeable and experienced,” said senior Nikhil Jacob, a member of the executive board of the Intercultural Affairs Office, which helped facilitate the presentation. “His message was definitely possible, [but] he seemed to be pointing fingers at Nike. This is an economic situation, and Nike’s following economic norms.”
Jacob said he was inspired by the presentation but thought the solution was to appeal to organizations like the World Trade Organization.
Both houses of Congress have bills designed to protect workers in less developed countries, but Keady said it lacks the support it will need to pass. He advocates contacting Nike directly, although the short film he showed indicated that Nike executives were unwilling to discuss the issue.
In response to pressure from the organization Keady founded to combat sweatshops, Educating For Justice, Nike denied having unfair labor practices in a marketing campaign started in September of 2000.
“Their PR lie was ‘Right issue … wrong company,’” Keady said. “After that, Nike itself reported that 50 to 100 percent of partner factories exceed the work hours allowed by its code of conduct.”
Most major clothing lines use similar practices, Keady said, but his campaign focuses on Nike because it represents 44 percent of the sportswear industry.
But sweatshops are not necessary, Keady said. “Capitalists with a conscience,” like No Sweat, pay workers $14 an hour, plus pension and health benefits, while making a profit.
Many students donated $20 to get a No Sweat shirt, which used the Nike swoosh to spell the word “slavery” — including one dressed entirely in Nike apparel.
Keady entered the campaign against sweatshops after researching them for a class at St. John’s University, where he also coached the Division I soccer champions. He lost his job because he refused to wear Nike apparel after the school entered a $3.5 million endorsement contract with Nike.
02-15-2007
