Representatives from the Stanford SweatFree Coalition met with the administration for the sixth time in eight weeks last Wednesday in a negotiation process that appears to have no end in sight.

While student activists remain firmly committed in their campaign to convince the University’s leaders to join the Workers’ Rights Consortium (WRC), organizers say that President John Hennessy has not expressed support for the more enforcement-oriented Designated Suppliers Program (DSP), another initiative they have been lobbying for.

SweatFree Coalition co-coordinator Dan Shih ‘09 said that Hennessy expressed concern about the consequences of joining the DSP at the Wednesday meeting because of its stringent enforcement policies, which he said the president worried would be too difficult to implement.

In joining the DSP, the University would force licensees that produce Stanford apparel to designate those factories as DSP compliant. Because many licensees produce the University’s apparel in a number of different factories, however, they would have to designate all of these factories as abiding by DSP’s stringent mandates. As a result, suppliers focused on keeping costs down could drop contracts with the University in order to avoid the scrutiny that comes with third-party monitoring.

“Because of the DSP’s emphasis on consolidation,” Shih said, “Hennessy was concerned it would remove monitoring from those factories where it was previously occurring.”

According to Shih, Hennessy expressed concern that the costs of making such changes would be so great that licensees would stop manufacturing University apparel. As a result, Hennessy said, independent monitoring of the conditions in these factories would also cease.

For its part, Shih said the SweatFree Coalition remains firm in their support of the DSP because of future benefits for the hundreds of workers in the DSP-compliant factories.

Another disputed issue at the negotiation table has been the effectiveness of the WRC as a monitoring group.

Stanford’s Director of Business Development Susan Weinstein has said during the meetings that the Fair Labor Association (FLA) is a more valuable alternative to the WRC.

In an interview with The Daily, Weinstein said the FLA does a better job of including corporations in its decisions, and thus would better ensure factory compliance with its code of working conditions.

“The FLA includes all parties who must share in the solution to be part of the discussion to develop a plan,” Weinstein said. “The WRC’s approach does not include licensees and factory owners. These stakeholders are key to this process, since they must ultimately adopt and monitor compliance with any requirements. If a recommended solution is unworkable for them, it will fail to achieve its goals.”

Weinstein also said the WRC monitors only apparel factories and would therefore neglect 30 percent of Stanford’s licensed merchandise.

Shih argued the FLA’s cozy relationship with the companies it investigates compromises its ability to impartially investigate working conditions in their factories.

“We think that the FLA fundamentally caters to businesses over the rights of workers,” Shih said. “We think the FLA is a cover for companies that want to appear sweat-free.”

The WRC-FLA debate is one that has raged across many college campuses after the WRC was created in 1999 by various university administrations, students and labor rights experts. To date, 194 colleges and universities have joined the FLA, while 169 have joined the WRC.

The dispute came to a head at the University of Oregon in 2000, when students objected to the University’s affiliation with the FLA and called on administrators to join the WRC. After a university-wide vote showed overwhelming support for the WRC, the Eugene, Ore. university President David Frohnmayer announced a switch to the WRC.

In response, University of Oregon alumnus Phil Knight, co-founder and former CEO of Nike, publicly announced that he would never again contribute to his alma mater; until that point, Knight had contributed $50 million to the university.

In a written statement, Knight expressed his strong support for the FLA and defended its enforcement mechanisms.

“To accept the University of Oregon’s endorsement of the WRC would be to place my company, our employees, our university-related manufacturers and their employees in unknown hands under undefined monitoring that has no protocols, no credibility, no role for the companies whose businesses are being monitored, and no independence,” he said. “The bonds of trust, which allowed me to give at a high level, have been shredded.”

In August 2006, Knight contributed $105 million to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received his MBA in 1962. It was the largest gift ever made to a business school.