The Death of Worker's Rights

Feminism Without Borders staged a funeral for worker's rights Saturday during the 10th annual Maryland Day to urge University of Maryland President C. D. Mote to sign on to the designated suppliers program. The action is part of a sustained campaign to stop university support for sweatshop made clothing. To learn more go to http://www.workersrights.org/dsp.asp.

More than a dozen students representing Feminism Without Borders, Students for a Democratic Society, Students and Workers Unite, and Community Roots solemnly proceeded down McKeldin Mall on campus eulogizing worker's rights and humane labor practices as a result of the University's current licensing policy. The group urged and encourage onlookers to urge President Mote to sign on to the designated suppliers program. The Maryland Day crowd includes current and prospective students, alumni, faculty, staff, neighbors, and relatives of the University - all with a small bit of power over Mote and University policy.

Meanwhile, Feminism Without Border's campaign continues. A petition is circulating (which y'all should sign) and communication to the University administration continues. More importantly, though, is the building momentum and student acceptance behind this campaign. At its core is the issue of the corporatization of the University. Whose interests dictate University policy: those of the students or those of Nike and Jansport and the administrators, regents, and trustees stock portfolios?

The influx of the corporate voice is easy to understand. The University and its logo, mostly because of its successful sports teams, has become commodity. The Maryland seal and name, just like the name and seal of many other universities, appear beside corporate logos and account for millions of dollars or revenue for both the school and the company. We must remember, however, that these items were likely manufactured in deplorable working conditions, in factories that allow neither breaks nor unions and deprive the people who work there basic human rights.

Previously Feminism Without Borders has delivered balloons, FWB: "Hey Mote!", letters, and even a Valentine to Mote in an effort to get him to sign on the the DSP. From 4 April:

The designated suppliers program was envisioned by the Worker's Rights Consortium and United Students Against Sweatshops as a way to leverage university logo licensing rights towards livable working conditions for the people producing clothing bearing university logos. The DSP is a set of standards clothing manufacturers must follow when producing university licensed clothing. The standards define a set of fair labor practices that must be followed in textile factories.

Media work shines the Sun on CP-SDS

The answers - good answers - will only come about through a whole lot of people thinking about it and talking about it and trying stuff. And that's what participatory democracy is about.

A great article on Students for a Democratic Society quoting College Park SDS's Jon Berger appeared in the Sunday 13 April issue of the Baltimore Sun.

This is a pretty significant article. This is one of the first profiles of SDS in the Washington-Baltimore area from the mainstream press. In the article, SDS is portrayed as positive, youthful, and intelligent. Written by a student, the piece speaks to sympathies for SDS and student activism from the student body. Even though there are a couple of misquotes, incorrect facts, the article very accurately expresses our commitment to change, our patience, and our hope for the future.

The resurrected organization has a long way to go before becoming a mass student movement. For now, members are focused on internal discussion and reaching out to other students. And they're willing to be patient.

Jon Berger, a College Park freshman, said, "A big part of this is education, it's hosting speakers and showing movies and having discussions. ... Because we don't have all the answers and we don't pretend to have all the answers.

To my dismay, SDS is shown as powerless in the article. This is really unfortunate, especially because SDS is really about building student power, i.e. fighting the disempowerment that is both a symptom of a corporate university and a prerequisite for its existence. I guess its mostly our fault - neither College Park nor DC chapters have made much of an impact on policy or practice of the powers that be.

Media work is hard work. Radical organizations have been positioned outside the mainstream and the for-profit media has a history of vilifying activists - yet we all want our work to garner the attention of the public eye. Communicating effectively with the media is necessary to get press. The cliche, "there's no such thing as bad press" might be valid for celebrities and politicians, but is less than kind to people or organizations trying to build a movement and gain support. How than can we organizers and activists not just get press, but the press we want? By communicating strategically with the media.

What is strategic communication? From the interviews for the Sun piece and from previous interactions with the media, my sisters and brothers and I have learned a few things about what it means to communicate strategically.

1. Present a focused, deliberate message
Before any interview, especially group interviews, sit down with everyone involved and have a conversation about what is going to be discussed and why. Ask questions like: Why are we being interviewed? What do we want people who read/see/hear the story to know? Where is our experience? What do we know? What are we comfortable talking about? Use the answers to distill something concrete and accessible. Something that can be reduced to a short quote in a newspaper or a soundbite on TV or radio and still make sense.

2. Less theory more action
Reporters and readers don't really care about the theory behind our organizing. It doesn't make headlines. It doesn't sell papers. It often requires book-length explanations. The media wants Who? What? Where? When? How? and we should give it to them.

3. Stick to talking points
Interviews can be really stressful and reporters are really good at making you talk. It is your job to give them only information you want to be printed. Try thinking about it this way: the less you say, the less reporters have to choose from when they are picking quotes to print. This is where you can take control, by determining in advance the information you want to convey and the way in which it will be conveyed.

4. Be cordial
Even though the corporate media is not really your friend you should be nice to them. They are trying to sell a story - but it is your story. If reporters walk away angry or scared, expect those reactions from people reading the subsequent article.

5. Be consistent
Know what you are trying to say and don't contradict yourself. If an issue is ambiguous or the organization's position undecided either don't mention it or say, "that's ambiguous," or, "we're undecided." Consistency is critical to credibility. Sounding like you know what you're talking about is almost as good as actually knowing what you're talking about.

Dead-on Sponsors for Clark School Part 2

BAE Systems is a Partner sponsor for this year's Maryland Day, a corporate sponsor of the Clark School of Engineering, and the 3rd largest global defense contractor. BAE Systems is famous for its warplanes: Typhoons, Tornadoes and newest F-35C and munitions, including cluster type and depleted uranium rounds. Based in the UK, BAE Systems was, until Thatcher, nationalized. Now it serves more than one-hundred clients globally with new and deadly methods for wreaking havoc and destruction.

Thanks BAE Systems for your generous support! I am glad the University of Maryland is comfortable with the blood money it accepts. More so I am glad the student body accepts that their education is being funded, in part, through death all around the world.

Dead-on Sponsors for Clark School Part 1

Still Flying Close to the Sun?

A review of Cathy Wilkerson's memoir, Flying Close to the Sun, a critical analysis of the new-left, and a look at the next left using Wilkerson's analysis as a lens:

Cathy Wilkerson's recently published memoir is a text full of nostalgia for the spirit of the US New Left (c. 1960s) and also criticism of its practices and organization. Wilkerson was intimately involved in Students for a Democratic Society(SDS), a student-based organization fighting for global justice and one of its successors, the Weather Underground, a militant revolutionary organization known best for their bombings buildings occupied by the repressive forces (NYC Police Headquarters, Marin County Hall of Justice, Sacramento and San Francisco Department of Corrections), the U.S. government (U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon) or war profiteers (ITT, Gulf Oil, Anaconda Copper).

She begins with the story of her childhood, highlighting her parent's divorce, her jaunts in the woods near her home, and her adolescence at a Quaker summer camp. She writes, "The Quaker meeting made sense to me. I felt connected as part of the community . . . I thought, it was only in the freedom of the trees that people within a community could really feel God's presence." (Wilkerson 35). Wilkerson's Quaker roots brought her to Swarthmore College where she connected to student activism.

Her first experience as an activist was block organizing in Chester, Pa. She worked with residents to improve their quality of life, dealing with housing rights, access to education, etc . . . It was here she was first arrested, participating in a boycott of a mostly Black and underfunded school in Chester. Her activism continued: she acted as the DC regional organizer of SDS, an Editor at New Left Notes, the SDS journal, and as a member of the mysterious Weather Bureau.

After her work as a block organizer, Wilkerson wondered if that kind of activism was effective; she wondered if she could make a difference through established means as well, so she signed on to a congressional campaign. Of the experience, she writes:

By late September I concluded that Congress was not a strategic place to work to change public opinion about the war because congressmen constant had to worry about getting reelected. While they could attempt to educate their constituents by providing a reasonable analysis of, for instance, the war . . . they were battling an increasingly efficient mass-media campaign waged in the name of patriotism by proponents of the war. No, I thought, the energy and the leadership required to get the facts out in the face of all this misinformation had to come from the movement, and SDS was one organization trying to do that. (Wilkerson 97-98)

It is here that her dedication to SDS became apparent and she began to involve herself more deeply in the organization - finding an understanding of both the tremendous strengths and tremendous weaknesses of the organization. Many scholars, and Wilkerson's writing concurs, argue that SDS's failure was because of an intersection of its racist, sexist, and classist analysis. Anti-war movement activists, using the moniker "The Mobe," organized in a way completely male dominated and ignorant of gender dynamics. After anti-inauguration demonstrations, Mobe'ers attending a rally booed and cat-called a woman speaker off the stage. (Wilkerson 242)

The struggle with the structural problem of sexism continued into the Weather Underground. Weatherman dogma prohibited monogamy. "They argued, existing monogamous relationships between men and women held both people back from new challenges." (Wilkerson 268-269) Unfortunately, this analysis came from men, the reality of an anti monogamy stance, however was that the men in the movement had free access to sex with any women in the movement, eliminating any agency women in the movement thought they had.

Whiteness and racism dealt another blow to SDS's effectiveness. Although emphasized less in Wilkerson's work, relations with the Black Panther Party never amounted to real collaboration. Both the Black Panther Party and the Weather Bureau considered themselves revolutionary organizations, neither stepped back to reconcile the differences in their respective analysis or compromise to a degree that would have enabled close collaboration. SDSers unable to deal with their whiteness, with white privilege, prevented close working ties with the Black Power movement, alienated Black youth and doomed SDS.

Today's SDS is plagued by the same difficulties. Our membership is still disproportionately white northeastern men. However, people have realized that an important way to deal with privilege is to recognized its existence and think about how it effects your life and the lives of others. Sexism and racism still exist and only through a sustained, vigorous commitment to recognizing and interrogating the systemic inequities and their effects on people can the new SDS hope to be successful. Steps are being taken in that direction. Coalitions are being made across lines of color and class. Identity-based caucusing is an integral part of SDS decision-making. Much of these efforts find root in contemporary thinking on identity politics and cultural studies.

Is the new New Left still flying close to the sun? The temperature is getting hotter, the movement stronger, calls for revolt louder - but are we paying enough attention to systemic inequity and its role in the struggle? Collective liberation is possible: the legacy of the old SDS can inspire the course of the new.

In early 1976, like a house of cards, the organization disintegrated rapidly . . . What endured among all of Weatherman's members was a continued commitment to work for peace, justice, and change . . . Despite the mistakes and rancor, we had all tried the best we could to realize our fullest humanity during times of terror and great upheaval. (Wilkerson 377)

Wilkerson, Cathy. Flying Close to the Sun. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.

FWB: "Hey Mote! . . .

. . . should really sign the DSP!"



Students from Feminism Without Borders, the Black Student Union, Students and Workers Unite, and Students for a Democratic Society delivered 41 balloons, several letters and a direct response to his deputy's criticisms of the designated suppliers program (DSP) today. The action, organized by Feminism Without Borders (FWB) as part of their sustained campaign to stop university support for sweatshop made clothing.

The designated suppliers program was envisioned by the Worker's Rights Consortium and United Students Against Sweatshops as a way to leverage university logo licensing rights towards livable working conditions for the people producing clothing bearing university logos. The DSP is a set of standards clothing manufacturers must follow when producing university licensed clothing. The standards define a set of fair labor practices that must be followed in textile factories.

Other organizations, such as the Fair Labor Association have joined with WRC and USAS to advocate for these changes.

The action today is a part of a the sustained lobbying campaign that FWB is organizing to try to get the university administration, President Mote, in particular, to act for workers rights and recognize the importance of a fair and safe workplace. Unfortunately, unless FWB can secure serious media for these creative, but small and quiet actions Mote and his handlers will be able to simply brush off the campaign.

FWB needs to up the pressure with each letter it delivers, bringing more students each time and continuing the creativity if the campaign is to be successful. More important, I think, to sustaining and growing the DSP campaign on campus is to connect it with issues that surround students every day. This is the hard part. There is a lot of privilege on our campus (and most college campuses) and it is hard to understand. I think empathy is very important. FWB has held a number of events to build that empathy and humanize the sweatshop worker. Even that isn't enough, though. What stake do we students have in the plight of workers in Guatemala? A more just world? True, but very abstract.

The point I am getting at is the very way students think is problematic. It is our jobs as organizers and activists to work to change that. The stake that students have in the plight of sweatshop workers is simple: we buy the clothes that pay for their bosses to bust their unions. We wear the clothes that were made in abusive working conditions. We continue to consume without considering where all this stuff comes from. That is problematic. We need to think critically about where and who and why and reevaluate our own patterns of consumption.