Duncan McDonald, the University’s vice president for public affairs and development, returned from a Worker Rights Consortium conference in Chicago Friday with new insights on the WRC’s current status and what kind of hurdles the group, which is still in its founding stages, has to overcome before becoming a functioning labor monitoring organization.
McDonald, who was one of about 40 administrators representing their universities at the conference, said the meeting gave WRC members a chance to meet in person and to discuss some shared concerns about the WRC’s structure.
“It was nice, I think, for the group to get to know one another and to talk about clearly how we will move [the WRC] from a concept to an organization,” he said. “The thing that I think has never been made very clear is that the WRC is still a concept, not an organization.”
University President Dave Frohnmayer signed on with the WRC for a one-year term on April 12 after the University Senate voted and recommended the University to join.
McDonald said he estimates the WRC is still at least two years away from any factory monitoring because it has no governing body. It lacks sufficient financial means and staff infrastructure, he said. But before the WRC can start monitoring, some universities hope to have some of their concerns addressed.
Those concerns are:
* At least half of the 12 governing board seats should be held by university members (currently three seats are allocated to university members, six are reserved for members of the advisory council and three are for members of United Students Against Sweatshops).
* The WRC needs a strategy for industry participation and membership.
* The financial viability of the WRC needs to be established.
* The WRC should explore how it could possibly work in collaboration with the Fair Labor Association.
* WRC members need to discuss, define and make operational the concepts of living wage and freedom of association.
“It is still not clear how this is all going to shake out,” McDonald said.
McDonald, who was elected to serve on a three-member working group to present these concerns to the WRC’s governing board after it is elected, said it was interesting to see that many universities shared similar or identical concerns. He said dealing with these concerns now is crucial to retaining and recruiting the members necessary to get the WRC off the ground. “These are not the Three Stooges sitting around,” he said. “This is a bunch of universities, and they’re all are saying the same thing. Let’s get it addressed now.”
WRC organizer Maria Roeper said the conference gave WRC members, especially those who did not attend the founding conference in New York City last month, a chance to get to know each other beyond contact on an e-mail listserve. She said it also allowed them to get a feel for who to vote for to represent universities on the governing board. Beyond that, Roeper said the meeting helped bring members up to speed on where the WRC is headed next.
“Some people needed some clarification on where the WRC was at,” Roeper said. “There’s also a greater understanding on how much needs to get done.”
And that is a lot, McDonald said.
He said WRC organizers and university representatives will have to compromise on the concerns the universities have brought to the table.
One concern is to include apparel industry representatives in the WRC and give them a voice in deciding what a living wage should be set at and how the monitoring will be conducted.
McDonald said just as the FLA has been criticized for its lack of labor representatives, the WRC will continue to be criticized for not giving the industry a voice in the organization.
“They’re being excluded, and it can’t happen,” he said. “You just can’t do that.”
But Human Rights Alliance member Sarah Jacobson said while the industry should play a role in solving workplace violations in factories abroad, they should not be represented on the governing board or in any other decision-making capacity.
“That seems very much like having the fox monitoring the chicken house,” she said. “I think we can talk to corporate leaders, but I don’t think that they should have decision-making power on a monitoring body.”
McDonald, however, said it would not only be fair to give the industry a voice in the WRC, but it would also help the organization financially.
Currently, member universities pay 1 percent of their annual gross licensing revenues in membership fees. The University of Oregon earns $300,000 per year in royalty licensing revenues. McDonald said the University is “in the middle of the pack” when it comes to fees, with some schools contributing as much as $30,000 and others as low as $1,000.
“When all is said and done, you would be lucky to get a support staff and office space,” McDonald said.
Even beyond financial issues, McDonald said it will be a long road before any monitoring will take place.
“It’s more than a financial issue. It’s just really how to do it,” he said.
Jacobson said although there has been no monitoring yet, the WRC has already begun networking in several countries, including Guatemala and Honduras.
“That kind of cross-country solidarity moves [the WRC] from being conceptual to being on its way to becoming a reality,” she said.
Jacobson also criticized some college administrators for wanting to include industry representatives on the WRC.
“It’s disturbing to me that the voices of our University administrators and the voices of corporate leaders are indistinguishable,” she said.
Some WRC organizers have been adamant about stressing that industry representatives have no place on any WRC decision-making body, but McDonald said there will have to be some compromising in order to satisfy both WRC organizers and university members.
“If these voices will persist and become controlling of the WRC, this will not work for us,” he said.
Friday, university administrators also discussed how to define and set a living wage and how to avoid stepping on the toes of sovereign states by setting a living wage for them.
“Who are we to say how to define these kinds of things, and who are we to impose our rules on sovereign nations?” McDonald said.
Despite all these unresolved issues, McDonald said he returned from the conference confident that these concerns will be solved.
“I honestly think this is going to be sorted out over time,” McDonald said. “I’m not only hopeful; I’m convinced.”
McDonald said he expects the future and the structure of the WRC to become clearer after the governing board is elected and some of the universities’ concerns are addressed.
“I believe we will know in less than six months whether the universities will have an effective role,” he said.
He said he was surprised to find out that about half of all WRC members are also members of the FLA.
“It made me revisit whether something jointly like this might work,” he said.
McDonald said with the WRC lacking industry representatives and the FLA not having labor representatives, he expects these organizations will continue to have a hard time gaining new members, although he did not exclude the possibility that the two might eventually merge or that a third organization might emerge.
“I think it’s going to be a race now between getting labor onto the FLA and business into the WRC,” McDonald said. “It won’t go away.”
UO addresses WRC worries at conference
Daily Emerald
April 30, 2000
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