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Northeast Anti-Sweatshop Conference for High School Students

By Courtney Clifford

Students have power to create change in the world, starting with changing their school communities. This was an important message conveyed at the Northeast Anti-Sweatshop Conference for High School Students held in Northampton, MA during the last weekend in September 2005.

About fifty students from seven states attended. It was co-sponsored by the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition and national organizations, SweatFree Communities and United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). In her role as a Labor-Religion Coalition intern, Courtney Clifford ( College of St. Rose, Class of 2006) participated as a workshop leader and wrote the following article.

Welcome

The facilitators and presenters of the conference kept the air open for questions and were welcoming to all students, regardless of their level of knowledge. For example, the facilitators asked the students what knowledge they had about the Sweatfree Schools Campaign. When a few minutes of silence followed, a USAS coordinator, Emma Roderick, said, “If you don’t know anything, say that—it’s okay.” Indeed, at no point were the students made to feel ignorant because of their lack of knowledge. As seventeen-year-old Shannon Hanley of Guilderland High School said, “I felt really welcome. It was a lot to take in, but the way it was presented made us feel very able to.”

Workshops

The weekend was divided into workshops for the larger group, strategic planning workshops for smaller groups, and community building activities. The workshops allowed the students to raise concerns, ask questions, and give advice to one another. Some of the workshop titles were “Sweatshops and the Global Economy: First hand accounts and student movements” and “Building Power and Strategic Planning.” The facilitators of these workshops focused on the knowledge that the students already had, using it as a basis for teaching more effective ways to build power for their student groups.

Allie Robbins, the National Organizer for USAS was one of the leaders for the workshop “Building Power and Strategic Planning.” Robbins learned about the Sweatfree Schools Campaign through members of the Long Island Labor-Religion Coalition and pushed for a sweatfree policy in her district. Having that connection, she is well aware of the challenges and advantages of being a high school organizer. She helped the students to define the word “power” and told them that it’s the ability to make someone do what you want, when they wouldn’t normally do so. She then discussed with them various groups within their school communities who have power, including administrators, teachers, and parents. The kids then told stories of success and struggle in their attempts to gain recognition from their principals and school boards. Robbins reinforced the idea that students have an incredible capacity for creating change, telling them that it was about “creating a place where you want to go to school.”

Where we’ve been

The experiences with achieving sweat free policies in their schools varied greatly among the students. Some students were able to have their demands met almost immediately, like the group from Commonwealth High School in Boston Massachusetts. This school is regarded as one of the more progressive in the Northeast, and as such, the headmaster was very willing to meet the students’ requests and switch to a sweat free purchasing policy. Said Avery Morrow of Commonwealth, shrugging slightly, “We (the anti-sweatshop group) were taking it slow, then right about the time we needed to order new shirts, we got it done.”

Hearing his story, one might almost forget that obstacles even exist in this kind of work. Other students, though, came to the conference feeling slightly more uncomfortable with their school’s response to the issue. When the students from Brattleboro High School in Vermont met with their school board about changing purchasing policies, they were faced with an unreceptive audience, some of whom even asked if a sweat free policy would violate NAFTA. Hearing this story, the conference facilitators took the opportunity to ask the entire group what kinds of strategies would help in this kind of situation. In doing so, the facilitators re-affirmed that confidence, creativity and education are key components to creating sweat free communities.

Where we’ll go

By the end of the weekend it was clear that, though the desire to change unjust systems manifests in each individual, it is through group cooperation and coalition building that the change is made even more possible. The facilitators worked as experienced mentors to the students, encouraging them to create a community both among themselves and with national organizations. Robbins said to the group, “You now have access to the Worker’s Rights Consortium, United Students Against Sweatshops, and the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition. You can call on any and all of us for advice.”

This sense of community certainly seemed to affect the students, as they all talked excitedly about how they were going to change their schools on the Monday after the conference. The enthusiasm created by the experience was new to some, while to others, like eighteen-year-old Dan Van Wormer of Guilderland High School, it was a reminder to keep hope alive. Said Van Wormer, “the information helps people who are new to it, but it also helps people who have done it for awhile to refresh the memory…we can do so much, because people have done so much already.” Seeing the energy and purpose of these students, it is sure that they indeed can do so much, and that they will.