Education Talking Union to Your Kids Curbing Corporate Greed Retired and Ready to Go At Indiana University, students are strong supporters of their athletic teams and proudly wear the school logo on their sweatshirts, caps and backpacks.
Student leaders say a key to their progress has been their coalition with local unions.
All across the nation, students are organizing in support of the rights of workers in sweatshops thousands of miles away. At the same time, students also are joining together on campuses to boost the wages of workers paid at the poverty level by university subcontractors, and are organizing into unions, seeking respect for the work they do as teaching assistants, tutors and research assistants. This new flowering of student activism is infusing the union movement with new vitality and solidifying an important alliance as unions step up their efforts to organize workers and fight the corrosive elements of international trade. The link between the clothes we wear and the workers who produce them offers a clue to the popularity of the college anti-sweatshop movement. Two years ago, the union hosted two young workers from the Dominican Republic who made college-logo baseball caps for most universities in the United States.