The Student Movement Comes of Age

"They must be afraid of the movement," says Jonathan "Doc" Bradley, a former US Army medic who is now a student activist at the University of Arkansas, "or they wouldn't be reacting this way." The "movement" he is talking about is the student movement, and "they" are the police, university administrators and corporate moguls who have been unsuccessfully attempting to crush students' persistent challenge to corporate power. But this past summer, the movement faced even more formidable organizing challenges within its own ranks.

In August, United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and 180/Movement for Democracy and Education (MDE), another student anticorporate group, held a joint conference on the University of Oregon's Eugene campus. Just a few months earlier, USAS, the most visible and successful of all the new student groups, had rocked campuses nationwide with protests against sweatshop conditions in the collegiate apparel industry, occupying buildings on more than a dozen campuses. The protests forced more than fifty universities and colleges to capitulate to students' demands and join the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an organization independent of apparel-industry influence and founded in April by students as an alternative to the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an industry-backed monitoring group [see Featherstone, "The New Student Movement," May 15]. Addressing the conference plenary, Thomas Wheatley, a former student and USAS activist at the University of Wisconsin who now works for the National Labor Committee, a leading antisweatshop organization, reflected on the movement's past year: "I didn't think we'd ever get this far. We're really pushing the labor movement forward, and we beat the living shit out of Nike and all kinds of companies."

The students have, very quickly, achieved a startling measure of power. The big question is, How will they use it? Those gathered in Eugene faced a rather daunting agenda: figuring out how to work effectively with workers in the global South and, in particular, how best to use the newly founded WRC; how to coordinate campus organizing efforts; and how to advance their work in coalition with labor unions and others fighting poverty and exploitation in the United States. To do all that, they needed to create an organization with some semblance of structure--a body that could, when necessary, allow far-flung and disparate member groups to speak with one voice.

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