Citing the lack of independent monitoring of the factories that produce Stanford apparel, the Stanford Asian American Activism Committee (SAAAC) has initiated a campaign to convince the University to join the Workers’ Rights Consortium (WRC) and the Designated Suppliers Program (DSP) to ensure that the factories in which its apparel are made are not sweatshops.

On Tuesday, the group plans to stage a noontime rally at White Plaza, during which members will march to the President’s Office and present their formal demands.

“We want to show that we are strong and that we are gathering support,” Sweat-free Stanford Coalition co-organizer Daniel Shih, a sophomore, told a group of 20 SAAAC members at a planning meeting last Friday.

While Shih and fellow co-organizer Mark Liu, a senior, described the planned march and the presentation of the demands as “non-confrontational,” both emphasized the need to be “spirited” and show the University that the organization is serious about its campaign.

“We want to dictate the movement on our own timetable,” Liu said. “If we had scheduled a meeting with the University, we wouldn’t have had a meeting for another month or two.”

In its formal demands, the group calls on the University to affiliate with the WRC, a non-profit organization that assists universities in drafting codes of conduct for the factories in which its clothes are produced, as well as with the DSP, the enforcement program that would gradually implement the University’s work regulations over a three-year period.

“The WRC is an independent monitoring body that provides necessary oversight of licensee factories and establishes a code of conduct for factories,” Liu said, “while the DSP, through certification and the consolidation of apparel manufacture in a number of factories, is a necessary additional safeguard against exploitation.”

Created in 1999 by various university administrations, students and labor rights experts, the WRC ensures that universities nationwide comply with sweatshop-free labor conditions — namely, that the factories that produce their apparel provide a living wage to their workers, comply with federal health and safety regulations, compensate for overtime, permit unionization and allow for independent monitoring.

To investigate factories’ conditions both in the United States and abroad, the WRC charges a fee of one percent of gross licensing revenues, up to a maximum of $50,000, from each affiliated school. To this date, 166 colleges and universities have affiliated themselves with the WRC — including Harvard, M.I.T. and Brown — while 30 schools are DSP affiliates, including Columbia, Duke and the entire UC system.

While both Shih and Liu admit that they do not have concrete evidence to indicate that University-licensed apparel factories are sweatshops, they maintain that they are calling for independent oversight and greater accountability.

“We’re fighting for a mechanism to ensure that the University is being responsible,” Shih said. “We don’t have definitive reports that the University is using sweatshop labor, but it is generally assumed in the garment industry that without the enforcement of regulations, companies overwhelmingly rely on sweatshops.”

Shih also pointed to a 2000 report prepared by the Business for Social Responsibility Education Fund (BSREF) and commissioned by Harvard and the University of California, which found that without effective and vigorous monitoring, sub-par working conditions existed in university-licensed apparel factories.

Historically, the University has resisted student calls for WRC-affiliation. In May 2000, 100 students gathered in White Plaza to sign a petition calling on the University to join the WRC but ultimately failed to garner the administration’s support. In March 2002, 112 student-athletes signed a similar petition and a sweat-free campaign was initiated in April with the goal to convince President Hennessy to join the WRC; yet this movement similarly failed to secure a positive response from the University.

These campaigns were oriented primarily around the Nike Corporation, whose alleged use of child labor and the sweatshop conditions in its third-world factories became well-publicized in the early 2000s. Liu and Shih said their campaign would not suffer a similar fate because they have not targeted any one apparel company.

“We’re not going after the corporations,” Shih said. “We’re going for a systematic solution to the problem. The University must use its unique power to license its name out to manufacturers as a way of ensuring that human rights are respected when sewing our apparel.”

Currently, the Sweat-free Stanford Coalition has drawn the support of approximately two dozen students, but members expressed confidence that the group’s public awareness drives would garner more on-campus support.

“Students don’t know that the brands that they are wearing are made in sweatshops,” freshman PaHua Cha said. “I was once at a workshop about GAP, and I felt very guilty when I looked down to see that I was wearing GAP myself.”

Ultimately, campaign members emphasized the need to work with the University to achieve reform.

“We need to take the step forward together,” said Scott Frank, a freshman. “The new campaign [the Stanford Challenge] started by the President compels the University to walk the talk that they have been talking.”

Inquiries to the President’s office were directed to Susan Weinstein, who could not be contacted before press time. SAAAC is holding a movie screening this Thursday from 6-8 p.m. at Okada and an info session on Friday from 5-7 p.m. at the Asian American Activities Center.