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Labor unions play role in sweatshop activism

By Vanessa Renderman
Features Editor

Chris Pickard/Chief Photographer

Yaffa Eliach, a speaker at the Holocaust Remembrance Conference, talks with Ben Partridge, a junior in schools of Science and Liberal Arts, about the hunger strike. Partridge is one of six Purdue students participating in the hunger strike.

Dozens of labor union members showed their support at the rally that kicked off the anti-sweatshop hunger strike last week, and some people are questioning the motives behind their support.

Lisa Setlak, '99 alumna and anti-sweatshop activist, said she thinks the support is the result of a common goal between the student activists and union members: workers' rights. Members of Purdue's University Conservative Action Network see it as the unions using students to unionize the world.

Setlak said she doesn’t feel the unions are using the students as a "pawn" for their ultimate goal.

"Our stance is that we want to keep these places open (and improve the working conditions)," she said.

The debate goes back to the differences between the Worker Rights Consortium and the Fair Labor Association.

The consortium is an organization that is being officially founded today. It was formed in part by United Students Against Sweatshops, the national student anti-sweatshop organization.

The purpose of the consortium is to monitor working conditions in apparel-making factories through one-on-one contact with factory workers.

The consortium is different from the other major monitoring agency, the Fair Labor Association, in that there is no corporate self-rule.

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Event to remember Holocaust

After the liberation of concentration camps during World War II, Yaffa Eliach was 7 years old. The KGB had taken her father, and her mother had been killed. But before he was gone, her father had a message for her.

"My father's major message to me was that everything can be taken away from you, but there is one thing that can never be taken away from a person," said the professor of history and literature at Brooklyn College. "And that is what is in your heart and in your mind.

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Education blocks upset students

Students who have made a change of degree by objective into the School of Education are upset because students who have not CODOed are given priority in scheduling for Block Three, a block which incorporates field experience for students majoring in elementary education.

Jamie Layer, a sophomore in the School of Liberal Arts who will be CODOing into the School of Education next semester to major in elementary education, said, "If I can't get into it when I'm ready to take it, it'll hold me back a semester."

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Loft Boys by Joel Lugar