Jewish Activism and United Students Against Sweatshops

By JESS CHAMPAGNE

It's not surprising that United Students Against Sweatshops—a progressive, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic organization—has a People of Color Caucus, a Women's Caucus, a Queer Caucus, and a Working-Class Caucus. These identity-based groups elect members to the USAS governing board and meet regularly to talk about the issues facing the anti-sweatshop movement.

Besides these official bodies, though, there is an informal shadow caucus whose existence should perhaps be no more surprising: the "Hyphenated Jewish Caucus". Its proud members include Marion Traub-Werner in Guatemala and Miriam Joffe-Block in Thailand; Lauren Stephens-Davidowitz and Peter Romer-Friedman from the Governing Board of the Worker Rights Consortium; and countless students across the nation.

The existence of this unofficial group—the subject of constant jokes among the Jews of USAS—highlights the number of Jewish students who have felt drawn to United Students Against Sweatshops. Many, like Romer-Friedman, count themselves proudly as "red-diaper babies" and have a strong sense of the secular, progressive, labor-friendly, Jewish identity they share with their parents and the communities they grew up in. Jacob Remes from Yale recalls being sung labor tunes by Joe Hill as bedtime songs; Romer-Friedman remembers waiting with family friends while his parents were arrested at various demonstrations.

This secular progressive model has become the stereotype of Jewish students involved in the anti-sweatshop movement. Some activists, though, like Daniel Smokler at Yale, grew up in religious homes and are leaders in their campus Hillels as much as in the anti-sweatshop movement. Many more come from Jewish families that are middle-of-the-road in both their religion and politics. Even with these students, the sweatshop message may ring true in part because of familial memories of New York immigrant sweatshops and other labor solidarity. One Oberlin activist reports that a member of her family perished in the Triangle Fire, while other students often recount their surprise when they realized that their politically uninvolved parents had a strong allegiance to unions.

The Jewish role in the student anti-sweatshop movement is clearly different than the role that Jews of the same age played in the early 20th-century movement to promote unionization and end sweatshops on American soil. Then, the young activists were fighting for their own health and welfare, acting from a position of poverty and disempowerment. Now, they are college students leveraging their privileged position to help the workers, mainly in Latin America and Asia, who make their clothing.

In what has been called the biggest U.S. student movement since the anti-apartheid struggle, USASers have negotiated, protested, and engaged in civil disobedience to get their college administrators to clean up the factories where college-licensed goods are made.

Even getting universities and companies to tell students where the factories are located is a challenge. Slowly, though, many universities have agreed to "codes of conduct" prohibiting specific violations of basic rights, from health and safety violations to physical abuse to wages too low to support a family, in the factories where their licensed clothing is produced.

Now, more than 60 universities have taken the next step and signed onto the Worker Rights Consortium, which will ensure that these codes of conduct are actually being followed. The WRC was set up by students, non-profits, and worker-allied groups in the regions where the clothing is produced. It is an alternative to the Fair Labor Association, which students and other anti-sweatshop activists have decried as being a corporate-controlled tool to cover up abuses, instead of fixing them.

At many schools, students have had to engage in long, intense pressure campaigns to get their universities to treat these workers right. Jewish students have attempted to expand awareness in the Jewish community. At the University of Pennsylvania, a Shabbat dinner was part of an occupation of the university president's office that formed the culmination of a year-long pro-WRC, anti-FLA campaign. At Yale, a similar Shabbat dinner was part of a two-week sleepout for the same purpose.

These events served more to reinforce the Jewish identities, sense of community, and morale of the activists than to send a public message.

Even in students' campaigns to get various student institutions to sign onto their goals, few Hillels or other campus Jewish institutions seem to have been targeted or stepped forward to take a stand. Some Hillels have taken small steps toward supporting anti-sweatshop activists, starting with the basic step of allowing USASers to make presentations, as at the University of Connecticut. At UNC, the Hillel donated food to the group of students sitting in. The Penn Hillel also made in-kind donations like photocopies, and Joffe-Block made her anti-sweatshop work her project for Tzedek Hillel, a Hillel International initiative designed to include Jewish members of the campus community in social action and community service and to reflect on that action in a Jewish context.

As the student anti-sweatshop movement continues to grow, the ranks of the Hyphenated Jewish Caucus (including their non-hyphenated counterparts) will no doubt continue to expand. The presence of large numbers of young Jewish activists is a reassurance that despite the increase in American Jews' affluence since the last battle against sweatshops, Jewish young people are again committed to the struggle. It is also a wake-up call for their elder counterparts in universities and for Hillel administrations, who have thus far largely failed to lend their weight to these students' efforts.