As University students enter their fourth day of occupying Johnson Hall, they are joining the ranks of protesters at colleges across the country who have risked arrest, and in some cases injury, to support the Worker Rights Consortium.
At the University of Iowa, students have occupied the office of President Mary Sue Coleman since Monday.
A community of protesters has set up camp around the administration building and is living there around the clock, said Lana Zak, president of the University of Iowa student government.
UI has joined the WRC — a non-profit group with the intent of monitoring the working conditions in factories that produce university-licensed apparel — but students at the Iowa City campus want the administration to renounce the Fair Labor Association.
Groups such as Students Against Sweatshops, the UI organization that has led the charge, say they don’t like the FLA because it receives funds from clothing manufacturers such as Nike, Eddie Bauer and Reebok.
Zak said student protests, which have been going on since the beginning of the year, have “really been heated since Monday.” There have been no arrests related to the protests at the 28,846-student university.
Students in Ann Arbor, Mich. claim the University of Michigan was “one of the first schools to have a mass prostest” about the WRC, said Michael Grass, news editor for the Michigan Daily.
In March of 1999, 30 students stormed the office of University President Lee Bollinger and occupied it for 51 hours. Michigan’s administration released a “code of ethics” as a result of the students’ actions.
In more recent action at Michigan, which, like Oregon, is one of 11 “Nike schools,” students staged a three-day sit-in protest at the dean’s office during the first week of February.
Michigan has signed on to the WRC.
“Compared with other schools, our protests have been relatively peaceful,” Grass said.
Matt Clark, the student body president-elect at University of Minnesota, said the WRC protests at his school were also relatively smooth.
“The popular opinion was to sign on to the WRC,” he said.
After protests at that campus two weeks ago, the University’s president “listened to the students and signed on,” Clark said.
At the University of Wisconsin campus, a crowd of students was prevented from occupying a chancellor’s office by campus police who used pepper spray. The late February incident was one of the most violent protests associated with the WRC this year.
Wisconsin has since signed on with the WRC.