Sweatshop issues to be reviewed Daniel J. Fitzgibbons CHRONICLE STAFF March 10, 2000    With student activists pressing sweatshop labor issues at colleges across the country, campus officials are establishing a committee to review current institutional requirements for firms that manufacture items with UMass insignia.      The committee, which has not yet been named, was announced Wednesday by Paul Page, vice chancellor for Administration and Finance. The panel will be charged with assessing whether the University's code of conduct for firms that are licensed to make clothes and other goods bearing the UMass insignia is both current and effective.      Page said that David P. Curley, director of Licensing and Trademarks, has been meeting with concerned students during the past few months to discuss possible revisions to the licensing code and methods of monitoring and enforcing the code's requirements. Now, Page said, it is time for a pan-campus group to become involved. He said the committee will be composed of a cross-section of students, faculty and staff.      The campus action also follows several highly publicized student protests at other institutions, including the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin. At Michigan, students protesting the school's stance on sweatshop labor occupied a dean's office for two days. Wisconsin students staged a sit-in outside the chancellor's office, a protest that ended with 54 arrests.      However, administrators at both schools and a third Big Ten institution -- Indiana University at Bloomington -- subsequently agreed to conditionally join the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), a new monitoring group activists say will help ensure college apparel is not manufactured in sweatshops.      Page said Wednesday that the University is sending a representative to the founding conference of the WRC on April 7 in New York City. The representative, who has not yet been selected, will be charged with investigating the potential opportunities of joining the WRC while also assessing WRC's viability and governance structure.      To date, the University has chosen not to join either the WRC or another monitoring group, the Fair Labor Association (FLA), a group of apparel makers, colleges and universities, and the U.S. Labor Department. Page said that many student groups, including a campus organization called UMass Students Against Sweatshops, say that the FLA cannot effectively monitor workers rights because it has too many corporate ties.      "The University wants to be proactive in these matters," Page said. "I will ask the committee to review the available information about the monitoring groups and the potential opportunities offered by each and to advise the administration on the best course of action." He said if the University decides to join either monitoring group, it would also undertake continuous assessment of its membership.      According to Page, the University established a code of conduct three years ago to ensure the rights and safety of workers in domestic and foreign factories that manufacture apparel and other products bearing the University's name or logo.      The code has been updated several times since it was established, Page said, as the result of input from students from both the Amherst and Boston campuses, the experience of peer institutions, and new information concerning the manufacture of college apparel.      The most recent and far-reaching update was last fall when a requirement was added to the code mandating that all firms licensed to make clothing bearing the UMass insignia or logo provide full disclosure of information concerning the names and locations of all their factories and their subcontractors to the University's Office of Licensing and Trademarks. This requirement is now written into all new licenses obligating disclosure prior to granting a license.      Page said that companies currently under a license agreement have until this coming September to comply with this requirement. He said the University has already received factory disclosure information from the University's largest licensees.      The Licensing and Trademark Office based on the Amherst campus oversees all licensing agreements for the five-campus University system. According to Curley, the University currently maintains approximately 320 active licensing agreements, 90 of which are for apparel.