Last week the Student Labor Action Coalition marched into Chancellor Biddy Martin’s office, opposing the University of Wisconsin’s athletic apparel contracts with less-than-transparent multinational monoliths like adidas. And Biddy sat down and had what one SLAC member called “a thoughtful and productive dialogue.” Oh, to have been a fly on the wall for that one. Imagine an initial awkwardness — especially when Biddy was asked to examine a magnifying glass by a student dressed as a detective. I personally was more amused when SLAC put a giant papier-m?ch? boot in then-Chancellor John Wiley’s office, urging him to “boot adidas.” But I genuinely would have been interested in hearing the discourse between SLAC, Biddy and Assistant to the Chancellor for Community Relations Dawn Crim. This spontaneous summit marks the first time in ages the activist left peacefully engaged with our university administration. To be blunt, this newspaper has stood for far more modest causes and gotten less attention from the powers that be than SLAC got last week.
I’m not an activist. That life never worked for me. I realize how pathetic that might sound to those with the balls to march into the Office of the Chancellor and demand a conversation. That takes guts, and I may be alone among my Herald colleagues in grasping the magnanimity of that activist impulse, but I decided a long time ago not to buy a single item of university athletic apparel produced by a multinational corporation. I am sure there are athletic apparel factories abroad that provide for minimum levels of workers’ rights. But I am equally convinced that in this globalized world, it’s really impossible to keep track of anything for very long. And it’s far too convenient to turn a blind eye to potentially unethical business practices. So I have no idea whether SLAC is correct at any given moment about specific cases of worker abuse at specific factories abroad. But I know when the University of Wisconsin made the decision to contract outside of the United States, it accepted tacit responsibility for the saturnalia of shadiness, exploitation and doublethink that have accompanied the wave of globalization over the past several decades.
It used to be that in television commercials, Bob Hope or some other ’50s-era superstar would waltz out and admonish viewers to “Look for the union label — it matters to me!” Those days are long, long gone. If you even asked about the union label in most stores these days, you’d be met with puzzled looks from clerks who live and breathe the ethic of NAFTA without knowing what NAFTA is. There is too little room here to go into exactly how unethical UW’s athletic apparel contracting is. Suffice it to say that if you know the slightest thing about globalization, you must assume these recent worker abuse scandals in Honduras are the tip of the iceberg. I may be wrong, but I don’t think so.
SLAC has focused its attention on making sure international factories are closely monitored by UW. They are correct that our administrators should never think about simply flying in business representatives for fluff-filled workshops on global corporate responsibility, as some have proposed. Wining and dining business elites in Madison does not create change abroad. The solution here, assuming that the job of a university is to promote more than its financial interests, is to let all extant contracts expire and make sure future generations of Badgers wear athletic apparel produced in the United States by American workers making a living wage. It’s not that UW doesn’t care. But this is a much more radical solution than the efforts UW has made over the past decade to “monitor” and “dialogue” with athletic apparel factories abroad. That approach, far from fixing globalization, perpetuates the myth that globalization works just because it has been shown to work in a few isolated instances. And the university, as an intellectual actor, needs to do a better job processing the messages it sends in its business decisions.
Will buying American mean paying more for athletic apparel? Well, duh. We used to pay more and we can again. And at any rate, my very modest economic training makes me suspect a very low elasticity of demand for UW athletic apparel. The students who pay for school spirit will not stop if a sweatshirt costs $60 instead of $40.
Back to the point. I’m a Catholic. I go to confession, where deliberate complicity in workers’ rights abuses is a serious matter. By engaging with SLAC, our chancellor has made clear that she knows something is rotten in the state of Honduras. That eliminates the excuse of ignorance. I can only guess here. But if we all became omniscient about every hidden, whitewashed, unjust labor practice committed to help paint Camp Randall red on gamedays, I suspect our administrators would be in the confessional for weeks.
Eric Schmidt ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science.
