Palo Alto, California

Many of today's students look back to the sixties as a seminal moment--a time to be studied for all of its lessons, both positive and negative. "I see the sixties as very chaotic, as something that scared the establishment," says Milan Saha of the Johns Hopkins Student-Labor Action Committee. "We are more pointed, more focused. We don't believe things are going to change overnight. We believe that the chaos will come from within the system, not from without." Indeed, this generation of activists seems more prepared, more studied, even more radical in their economic critique than their SDS ancestors. "This is really different from the sixties," says Jo-Ann Mort, communications director of the garment and textile union UNITE. "They are doing something right where they live, right at home. Something with immediate and tangible impact." Close links with labor were rarely forged or even sought by the students of the sixties. And organized labor, of course, was firmly in the grip of a cold war leadership that rejected just about everything that the student radicals embodied. But since then the gap between student and labor activists has dramatically narrowed.

It has been narrowed, in part, by the now three-year-old Union Summer, which has cranked out almost 2,000 alumni, and by the aggressive outreach programs of unions like the Service Employees (SEIU) and UNITE. "This is a strategic, deliberate move by Sweeney's AFL-CIO," says Amy B. Dean, executive officer of the powerful South Bay Labor Council in San Jose, California. "The Vietnam War's been over for a long time now. It's time for us to get back together with students. We need the coalition that working with students brings us."

Movement Time

The real steam of the new movement comes from the unholy relationship between American universities and the mostly offshore sweatshops that produce their logo-emblazoned shirts, sweatshirts and shorts. The campus antisweatshop campaign began to pick up speed when a dozen students returned from the Union Summer experience of 1997 to their home campuses of Duke, Harvard, Illinois and Georgetown with newly honed consciousness and organizing skills. After a year of arduous organizing and growth, they got together last July and formed the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). Their goal: to impose rigid standards for protecting workers' rights on manufacturers and contractors that produce apparel with collegiate logos.

About 160 US universities support an antisweatshop code proposed by the Collegiate Licensing Company--the middleman between colleges and apparel manufacturers. But USAS and other student activists argue that the CLC's code is not stringent enough. That's why students took over the administration building at Duke this past January and forced the university to fight for higher labor standards at CLC. From Duke, the movement spread like wildfire, sparking takeovers at Wisconsin and Georgetown and lighting up around a hundred campuses on the sweatshop issue.

The basic moral dimension of the student demands struck a sympathetic chord. Linked by e-mail and Web pages, students rallied nationwide to try to block their universities from making money off of sweat labor. "We can't walk around in these sweatshirts that stand for Jesuit and Catholic identity when we know the conditions they are produced in," says Cassandra Lyons, a Georgetown freshman who participated in the protest at her campus.

That sort of moral indignation helped pulverize the long-standing reticence of students on labor issues. Derek Dorn, a 22-year-old grad of Cornell and of Union Summer who now works in the AFL-CIO research department, remembers the dramatic impact on campus when UNITE brought in hat workers from the Dominican Republic to discuss their working conditions. "I was amazed--300 students showed up," Dorn says. "A lot of students who otherwise would not have shown up for a labor meeting started coming after they got exposed to the sweatshop issue. Now they see labor as a tool that fights for social justice across boundaries of gender and race."

It seemed inevitable that energized students would soon broaden and radicalize their agenda. While in the sixties the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War infused the student movement with a keen awareness of racial oppression and the excesses of the state and its military machine, the new radicals of the nineties are starting out where the sixties left off: with a probing critique of the economic system, informed by an understanding of its gender and racial dimensions. "Antisweatshop work is very radicalizing," says the University of Wisconsin's Eric Brakken. "It doesn't take long before you begin to understand how capitalism works."

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