University representatives returned from the Worker Rights Consortium’s second governing board meeting Tuesday with new impressions of where the labor watchdog group stands.
Vice President of Public Affairs and Development Duncan McDonald and marketing professor Lynn Kahle are not on the WRC’s 15-member governing board, but attended the meeting, which took place in Washington, D.C., as observers. Both said they came back with the feeling that much remains to be done before the group can begin functioning as a labor monitoring group, especially after the group’s chairman unexpectedly resigned.
“I think the viability of the group continues to be in question just because of the slowness of the progress,” McDonald said. “But it may not be for a lack of trying.”
He said the WRC still has not received important incorporation papers that would make it an official non-profit group and would allow member universities to begin paying fees.
“There is not a group to pay,” McDonald said. “The group needs to grow, but in order to grow, they need to show they’re viable.”
Thus, the WRC is in a peculiar position, trying to gain momentum and support while still in the process of getting off the ground and having few concrete accomplishments to show. The WRC is also still looking to replace the group’s interim executive director, Maria Roeper, with a permanent director. Roeper could not be reached for comment by press time.
Kahle, who said he and McDonald were able to have some input about the meeting through interaction with the governing board’s university representatives, said the group has already scaled back its goals on how to conduct monitoring.
While the group passed its bylaws as expected, Kahle and McDonald said they were surprised to see the board’s chairman, George Miller, D-Rep. Calif., resign from his position and the WRC overall.
“The fact that he was pulling away from this group certainly takes away some of the luster,” McDonald said. “That certainly hurts the WRC.”
Daniel Weiss, Miller’s chief of staff, said the congressman continues to support the WRC, but did not feel that his obligations as a U.S. representative allowed him to meet all expectations of a WRC chairman.
“He resigned because it would be difficult for him to fulfill his role under the rules of the House [of Representatives], which would prevent him from using congressional staff,” Weiss said. “And when Congressman Miller gets involved in something, he likes to really get involved.”
Shortly after Miller’s resignation, the WRC’s Advisory Council elected Mark Barenber, a professor at Columbia University’s law school, to fill his seat.
Kahle said as a result of limited membership and funds, governing board members have realized that there probably won’t be funding for on-the-spot surprise monitoring. Instead, the WRC plans to gather complaints from workers, which will then be investigated by non-governmental organizations.
“The students who are participating have very admirable ideas,” Kahle said. “I think they are making progress, but slowly.”
He also said although some student protesters at the University demanded that the University refrain from joining the Fair Labor Association, another labor-monitoring group that, unlike the WRC, is industry-driven, WRC board members took no stance on that issue.
“They explicitly said the WRC has no position on whether people should join the FLA,” he said.
The University joined the FLA shortly before the beginning of fall term.
Kahle added that board members, although still opposed to industry participation on the WRC’s board, discussed developing processes for working on resolving problems with labor conditions. After all, Kahle said, problems cannot be fixed without incorporating factory representatives.
But while the WRC’s board is working on finding ways to incorporate industry cooperation into the WRC’s monitoring processes, McDonald said he came away from Tuesday’s meeting with the impression that industry representation on the group’s board is out of the question.
“It’s my view… that the issue of corporate participation on the board is dead in the water,” McDonald said. “On the other hand, there seemed to be a somewhat more conciliatory tone about ways to engage licensees.”
The lack of industry representation on the WRC was one of the concerns University officials voiced when signing on to the group in April, after students staged protests and camped outside Johnson Hall for days, and the University Senate recommended that the University join the organization.
New concerns raised by some member universities involve insurance and liability issues, McDonald said. Initially the WRC had been founded on the idea that students from member universities would conduct some of the monitoring, information gathering and reporting abroad.
However, McDonald said whether the universities or the WRC will be responsible for providing insurance, coping with issues of liability and possible defamation, and training students for accurate information-gathering remains to be decided.
Many of these issues go back to money, which universities still haven’t been able to contribute because of the WRC’s lack of official status and a bank account, he said.
“You’re going to need a lot of members if you are going to be able to fund some of those things,” McDonald said.
He said the group will have to tackle one issue at a time and will have to take up the ratification of bylaws again once it gains its official status.
McDonald said he hopes the group will have filled the chair of executive director and an opening on the governing board, and taken up other outstanding issues by its next governing board meeting, which is scheduled for early next year.