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Scholars Against Sweatshop Labor (SASL) was organized to produce a statement discussing the anti-sweatshop movement on college and university campuses in the United States. This letter was sent on October 22, 2001 to the chief administrative officers of more than 1,600 colleges and universities in the U.S. The letter was written by the SASL Steering Committee and has been endorsed by a total of 434 scholars. We wrote this SASL letter in response to a previous one sent out a year ago by the Academic Consortium on International Trade (ACIT). The important differences in perspective between SASL and ACIT are spelled out carefully in the SASL letter. For your convenience, we provide a direct link to the homepage of ACIT. Of course, the SASL project was begun well before the September 11 terrorist attacks. In fact, we delayed sending the letter in response to those horrible events. At the same time, it seems clear that the basic issue raised by the SASL letter-the decent treatment of low-wage workers and the poor throughout the world-has become even more pressing in the aftermath of September 11. A basic profile of the 434 signatories of the SASL letter is as follows. All Steering Committee members are professional economists, and, in total, 73 percent of the signatories are economists. An additional 10 percent are political scientists and seven percent are sociologists. The remaining 10 percent of signatories includes scholars in history, industrial relations, law, anthropology, management, philosophy, and linguistics. A total of 80 percent are employed in the United States. The remaining signatories are working in 19 other countries. Moreover, a large number of those employed in the U.S. are also originally from elsewhere, including many developing countries. In short, those endorsing the SASL letter are primarily professional economists and other U.S. academics, yet the list still includes a widely diverse group of scholars. We consider this a strength of the SASL initiative, since the issue of global sweatshops is not only a matter of economics, or, even more narrowly, international trade economics. Rather, it is a question whose ramifications stretch across the frontiers of economics, politics, industrial relations, law, history and ethics. The endorsers of the SASL letter are also diverse in terms their professional experiences and the institutions in which they are employed. Signatories include a Nobel Laureate in Economics (Lawrence Klein) two former U.S. Labor Secretaries (Ray Marshall and Robert Reich), a former Undersecretary of Labor for the Philippines (Rene Ofreneo) and a former Minister of both Finance and Planning in Somalia (Ibrahim Samater). Numerous endorsers have been officers of professional organizations and have served, or are now serving, as university administrators.
If you would like more information about SASL, please contact us. |
