For more than a decade there’s been a small but vocal group of students on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus willing to give it the old college try when it comes to tackling anti-sweatshop issues.

While the movement has scored a handful of small victories over the years, the spirited do-gooders weren’t able to make much of a dent in how the leading sportswear companies went about producing T-shirts, sweatshirts and hats featuring college logos -- until now.

Using a series of pressure tactics, an anti-sweatshop coalition of students from across the country on Nov. 17 succeeded in persuading Russell Athletic, one of the nation’s leading sportswear companies, to rehire 1,200 workers in Honduras who had lost their jobs when Russell shuttered its factory shortly after workers unionized.

“It’s pretty amazing to think that those people now have their jobs back,” says junior Daniel Cox, a member of UW-Madison’s Student Labor Action Coalition.

The coalition is a pro-worker group and UW-Madison’s affiliate of United Students Against Sweatshops, the national alliance of student groups that played a key role in convincing nearly 100 colleges and universities -- including UW-Madison -- to end or suspend apparel licensing agreements with Russell due to its anti-union tactics.

“It’s frankly embarrassing for a company to have UW-Madison or other universities say you’re using sweatshop labor practices,” says UW-Madison senior Jan Van Tol. “It’s a big blow to their brand image, and that’s where a lot of our power comes from.”

Students nationwide also distributed fliers inside sporting goods stores telling customers to boycott Russell, and some picketed the NBA Finals this past summer in Orlando and Los Angeles to protest the league’s contract with the company.

“So you had retailers pressuring the brand, pressuring Russell, saying ‘We’re losing sales because of your bad behavior,’ ” says Jane Collins, a UW-Madison professor of community and environmental sociology and author of the 2003 book, “Threads: Gender, Labor and Power in the Global Apparel Industry.”

“So that really created a significant amount of pressure,” adds Collins. “And when Russell acted, it definitely gave the students and their efforts legitimacy.”

Exactly how much influence these college students hold remains to be seen, but those involved in the anti-sweatshop movement on the UW-Madison campus now have set their sights on Nike Inc. -- the world’s leading supplier of athletic shoes and apparel. Two factories Nike subcontracts with in Honduras — Vision Tex and Hugger de Honduras -- closed in January without paying more than $2 million in legally mandated severance and back pay to 1,800 workers.

“We’re going to keep the pressure on these companies,” says Cox. “This Russell case is proof that when students get involved, they can have an impact on an international scale.”

In the mid-1990s, while students at places like the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor began to raise concerns about their institutions’ relationships with Nike, some at UW-Madison started asking similar questions about the school’s dealings with Reebok. Both companies were being accused by activists of using sweatshop labor.

Yet in July 1996, the University of Wisconsin System’s Board of Regents gave the green light to a five-year contract in which Reebok would pay UW-Madison $7.9 million to outfit Badger athletes and coaches in an exclusive apparel deal.

With students at more and more campuses starting to believe that their universities were complicit in the sweatshop system, activists from about 30 schools -- including UW-Madison -- came together in July 1998 to form United Students Against Sweatshops. Today, USAS refers to itself as a student-run, grass-roots organization that is dedicated “to all struggles against the daily abuses of the global economic system.”

But Van Tol admits that even now apparel companies “don’t give students the time of day” when they start protesting or hurling criticisms. “It absolutely takes the institutional power of a university or some other large body,” he says.

That’s why the founding of the Worker Rights Consortium by university administrators, labor rights experts and student activists in April 2000 was significant. The WRC -- now with more than 170 university affiliates, including UW-Madison -- is an independent labor rights monitoring organization that investigates working conditions in collegiate apparel factories around the world. The organization is funded with membership fees from institutions.

Change, however, continued to come slowly.

“There have been victories along the way, but they’re the kinds of accomplishments over the years that the average person wouldn’t notice,” says Collins, who is a member of UW-Madison’s Labor Licensing Policy Committee, an advisory group that keeps tabs on companies that produce apparel with the UW logo. “When the Worker Rights Consortium started, companies would say, ‘We can’t disclose our factory locations, that’s a trade secret.’ And now those locations are posted online. So this whole process has become more transparent, and that’s important, even if it isn’t overly newsworthy.”

Recent stands against apparel giants, however, have had only limited success.

In January 2008, UW-Madison ended its licensing deal with New Era Cap Co. -- which produced baseball-style and knit caps with university logos -- after allegations of discrimination and anti-union activity surfaced at one of the company’s factories in Mobile, Ala. That New Era deal generated about $8,000 a year in revenue for the university.

But Dawn Crim, a special assistant to the chancellor for community relations, says UW-Madison was the only school to end its New Era contract in this situation.

“When you act alone, the impact just isn’t there,” says Crim, who has traveled to El Salvador, Thailand and Cambodia to explore work conditions and allegations of wrongdoing.

In April 2008, the Labor Licensing Policy Committee hosted representatives of Adidas and the Worker Rights Consortium in the hopes of bringing closure to a complaint that dates back several years. When the factory, which contracted with Adidas from 2000 to 2002, was closed in 2005, 260 workers in El Salvador were dismissed without receiving their share of a total $800,000 in back pay or severance. Adidas has said it attempted to pay the workers, but the funds were stolen by the local factory owner. The issue remains unresolved.

“What happens is, if you don’t act strong enough and quick enough, people forget about these different situations and it’s all but hopeless to help these people out,” says Van Tol, who wishes UW-Madison would generally spend less time engaging in talks with apparel companies over alleged violations and instead be quicker to end contracts.

Most recently, the Worker Rights Consortium issued a 36-page report last fall detailing substantial evidence that Russell closed the company’s Jerzees de Honduras factory in Choloma, Honduras, as a hostile response to workers attempting to unionize the factory. UW-Madison’s code of conduct for licensed manufacturers states factory workers must be allowed to form a union, if they so choose.

In early February, UW-Madison’s Student Labor Action Coalition, which currently features about a dozen active members, brought workers from the Jerzees de Honduras factory to campus to speak with the university’s Labor Licensing Policy Committee. Later in February, Chancellor Biddy Martin announced UW-Madison was ending its relationship with Russell -- which made fleece wear with the school’s logo, generating nearly $40,000 in revenue in 2007-08 -- once the contract ran out in March. UW-Madison was one of the first universities to announce such a decision.

But now, with Russell’s recent decision to rehire its workers in Honduras, schools are expected to eventually allow the company to sign on and produce apparel with college logos once again.

“Companies usually want to do the least that they have to do to appear to be ethical,” says Collins. “The Russell situation just kind of raises that bar and it suggests that you can’t just have a good advertising campaign around these issues, you also need to make things right.”

With the successful campaign against Russell Athletic in the rearview mirror, anti-sweatshop activists at UW-Madison now are focusing on Nike.

“I think the Russell victory has the possibility of really being a game-changer,” says Cox. “This sends a strong message to the students, consumers, universities and apparel companies.”

According to an October report produced by the Worker Rights Consortium, two of Nike’s subcontractors that closed shop in Honduras in January still owe severance and back pay to some 1,8000 workers. As a licensee of UW-Madison apparel, Nike is bound by a university code of conduct for producers that requires payment of these legally mandated wages and other benefits.

Chancellor Martin wrote a letter to Nike on Nov. 3 expressing concerns about the allegations and asking the apparel giant to “provide us with detailed information about your company’s remediation plans” by Nov. 11. On Nov. 10, Nike sent a generic letter to all universities that had been asking about the situation, stating the company is “deeply concerned about the issues raised by the Worker Rights Consortium ....” That letter also states “it is important to note that, to the best of our knowledge, none of the products manufactured for Nike at either Hugger or Vision Tex was collegiate licensed apparel, aside from a one-time order of 800 units in 2007 for one university partner.”

UW-Madison, however, was not satisfied. “We don’t consider that to be a response to the chancellor’s letter,” Crim said at the time.

At the urging of student activists, the school’s Labor Licensing Policy Committee voted 7-2 on Nov. 13 to recommend that Chancellor Martin start taking steps to end the university’s apparel contract with Nike -- a deal that brings the university about $50,000 per year. The committee’s vote, however, is strictly advisory, and Crim says the university administration hopes to have a conference call with key Nike representatives in the coming weeks before taking any action.

“We’re not very happy about that,” Van Tol, a student member of the Labor Licensing Policy Committee, says of UW-Madison’s measured action. “One thing we’ve learned over the years is that unless there are mechanisms to force compliance, then a company like Nike will do whatever they can get away with. They’re not in this to make people feel good, they’re in it to make money.”

Crim says the university rarely acts as quickly as some activists would like due to the complexities involved with each situation. “Really, this is about engagement and working with them to remediate the problem,” says Crim. “Nobody wins when contracts are ended. Ultimately, it’s about workers and human rights, and if you end the contract you have no leverage.”

A Nike representative responded to an interview request with an e-mailed statement: “Nike Inc. is disappointed and concerned that two Honduran subcontract factories, Vision Tex and Hugger, were forced to close in January 2009 due to bankruptcy, leaving workers without their severance pay entitlements. Nike believes that factories which directly employ workers are responsible for ensuring that their employees receive their correct entitlements. Nike has been in discussions with the primary contractors and other brands that were placing orders with Vision Tex and Hugger as well as engaging other relevant stakeholders in Honduras, including the unions, to encourage continued dialogue to reach a resolution regarding severance.”

But Martin suggested in her Nov. 3 letter to Nike that the company itself was ultimately responsible for operations at these factories: “Ultimately, we believe under the university code of conduct, it is Nike’s responsibility to ensure that alleged labor rights violations by your subcontractors are remedied.”

Notes Collins, who voted to ask Martin to take steps to end the Nike contract: “If we can’t hold them responsible for companies where they contract, then we can’t do anything.” UW-Madison’s Labor Licensing Policy Committee will address this topic again at its next meeting on Dec. 11.

Until then, the students will continue to push for change.

“I kind of came up in the 1960s and the movements that we were part of then, none of them lasted this long,” says Collins, who has been working with students on anti-sweatshop issues since 1999. “It’s amazing, given that these students turn over every four years, the longevity of this movement. It has ebbed and flowed, but it has continued.”

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