Just 15 weeks after the University signed on for a one-year commitment to the Worker Rights Consortium, student leaders and administration officials are at odds over the labor-monitoring group’s current state of affairs.
President Dave Frohnmayer is concerned about the organization’s stability following attendance Thursday at the WRC’s first-ever board meeting in Washington, D.C. The University signed on with the group April 12, an act which came after several days of protest by approximately 100 students who camped in front of Johnson Hall to urge the University to join the WRC.
The original sign-on letter included several conditions that the University wanted met, including more influence for the 57 university members of the WRC, industry participation and open meetings. Frohnmayer said at the time that he was willing to give the organization a chance to show that it could follow through on the group’s stated goal of improving labor conditions at foreign apparel-producing factories, owned by corporations such as Nike and Reebok, among others.
With his first good look at how the WRC is set up and how it may operate in the future, however, Frohnmayer said his biggest surprise at the meeting was how much work actually has to be done.
“This was to be signed on as a monitoring organization,” he said. “And to have the student members of the organization say that monitoring is a long way away … Well, if it’s not for monitoring, what is it? The timelines have become extremely important.”
The University Senate has set up a WRC review committee which meets twice weekly to discuss the issues, with a more thorough annual review set for next April. A full report from Thursday’s meeting will likely not be submitted to the committee until sometime in October, Frohnmayer said, but the fate of the WRC and the University’s partnership could be in jeopardy.
“There are members of the faculty who, if they believe that the conditions that we set forward are not being met, would be prepared to review it sooner,” Frohnmayer said.
ASUO President Jay Breslow admitted that he also has concerns about the WRC, but said any kind of wavering by the University now is a poor choice.
“We want to make sure that we’re effective with the money that we’re spending,” Breslow said, referring to the University’s membership fee of approximately $3,000. “I think that it’s going to take more than a year to start an organization like the WRC, and to sign on for a year and then get out of it because they’re not where we want them to be, that’s not acceptable to me.”
Breslow has no decision-making power in regards to the WRC.
Thursday’s meeting of the WRC’s governing board and advisory council was focused mainly on organizational aspects, including the approval of its articles of incorporation and by-laws.
But Vice President for Public Affairs Duncan McDonald, who attended the meeting along with Frohnmayer and business Professor Lynn Kahle, said several university officials in attendance expressed concerns about the WRC’s governance arrangement, which was changed at the meeting. In fact, McDonald said that approving the articles of incorporation and by-laws should not have been done before the issue of governance was handled satisfactorily.
The WRC’s original governing board was six members selected by the WRC’s advisory council, three student representatives from United Students Against Sweatshops and three university representatives. Several votes at Thursday’s meeting — attended by 10 of the 12 board members — ended up 8-2, with the university representatives casting the two losing votes.
Now it stands at a five-five-five breakdown, a system that McDonald said is still unfair to universities.
“Some university representatives felt that in effect, universities would still not have much strength in this new setting because there would be voting blocs,” he said. “It seems to be a very minor improvement, but I don’t think it will serve the long-term interests of the universities. It still portends 10-5 votes.”
Frohnmayer, McDonald and Kahle attended the meeting only as observers and had no direct input. Rutledge Tufts, a University of North Carolina administrator and one of the current three university representatives on the WRC board, said he received a mixed sense on the issue of governance.
“We got a bell curve, where there were one or two people interested in leaving it just as it was, and there were one or two people who wanted to get more university representatives,” he said. “It was fairly clear to us, however, that we did not have the votes to go beyond parity.”
McDonald’s opinion that the arrangement will lead to voting blocs is not shared by the WRC’s treasurer and board member, Marcella David.
“One of the assumptions you make when you ask for more university representatives is that the other members will not work to the benefit of the universities,” said David, a professor of law at the University of Iowa. “I don’t think there will be strict voting blocs.”
The WRC’s lone full-time, paid staff person, Maria Roeper, called the eight-hour meeting a success and said she hoped universities are working with the organization in good faith. Although she admitted that she has not been up-to-date on Frohnmayer’s reaction to Thursday’s gathering, she acknowledges that the University is in a more visible place than some of the others.
“Oregon has been the most outspoken against the WRC, which is understandable in light of the $30 million withdrawal of funds by [Nike CEO and President] Phil Knight,” she said.
Knight announced on April 24 that he was ending his personal donations to the University, including a reported $30 million pledge to help expand Autzen Stadium. Frohnmayer admitted that in hindsight, more should have been done to assess the group’s stability.
“Considering how divisive it is has been for our community … we owed it to ourselves to do a much deeper investigation into many of these questions than time permitted,” he said. “Some people’s sense of idealism and passion got ahead of where the facts were.”
Those facts about where the organization actually is in regards to formation are also up for debate among WRC representatives.
“Things are proceeding about the way it was hoped from the April meeting,” David said. “I’m quite pleased with the progress that has taken place.”
She pointed out that the WRC will soon be turning in organizational and financial documents to the New York attorney general’s office for review and that a nationwide search has begun to find an executive director, a position she hopes is filled by the WRC’s next meeting on a to-be-determined date in October.
Tufts, the board member from North Carolina, said progress was made at Thursday’s meeting, but maybe not as much as the group originally intended.
“There’s a ‘chicken or the egg’ question here — we have a few pieces of egg shell and a few feathers, but that’s more than we had before,” he said.
The group’s financing was another concern for University officials. The WRC gets 1 percent of revenue from licensed products sold through the member universities, which could generate about $150,000. Other funding will come from future grants and gifts.
The group’s $295,000 projected annual budget was approved at the meeting, and David said that according to her calculations that figure matches the current expenses. Frohnmayer and McDonald, however, expressed doubts that the funds would be enough to truly make the WRC viable.
Industry representation on the WRC board came up as another contentious issue and no one contacted for this story offered any hope for that becoming a reality.
“To treat corporations as second-class citizens makes no sense,” McDonald said. “I feel that universities may end up as second-class citizens here, too.”
Students with ties to the Human Rights Alliance, the group that helped lead April’s protest at Johnson Hall, reacted to the new
s of administration’s dismay with charges that the school is not doing enough to help the WRC get off the ground.
“It just seems that President Frohnmayer and Duncan McDonald are not working with the organization to make it run, but publicly criticizing it,” said Chad Sullivan, who is the student senate University affairs coordinator. “What good does publicly criticizing the pace of an organization do after its very first meeting, other than to disrupt the process and slow it down or destroy it?”
McDonald said that perspectives such as Sullivan’s just aren’t true in his opinion.
“I’m not surprised that a small group of students with a particular agenda would have that viewpoint, but we spend a lot of our time trying to be of influence and being helpful,” he said. “You can’t tear anything down that hasn’t been built.”