Legitimacy and Funding. As more than a hundred schools were signing on to the FLA, students across the country began mobilizing support for an alternative system. At several campuses, students organized sit-ins, held public debates and demonstrations, brought sweatshop workers from Latin America to speak on their campuses, and waged campaigns to encourage their administrations to adopt stronger codes of conduct and licensing agreements. As a direct result of student activism, corporations like Nike and Champion have begun disclosing the locations of their factories. Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the NLC, believes that corporate disclosure and education will eventually result in changes in national labor policy and trade agreements.
Boycotts are detrimental to the movement's efforts.
Kernaghan believes that by educating consumers, allowing them to shop with a conscience, pressure will be placed on retailers to reveal the locations of their worldwide factories and open them to independent inspection teams by local human rights and religious leaders. Companies respond to pressure and social movements and only take notice when the public eye is bearing down on them. Our campaign banks on the public's conscience and its desire to do the right thing. The NLC's agenda is to continue to pressure these multi-national corporations using the campaign and its human and labor rights affiliates to educate all workers around the globe of their rights, and eventually open a legal space for these workers to empower themselves and to learn and better defend their rights. This law would hold manufacturers and retailers responsible for violations of labor standards in the contracting shops that produce their work.