Every morning I receive a long e-mail from UT’s Office of Public Affairs with a list of campus events being held the following day. As you can imagine, at a school like UT the list is very, very long. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, no matter which day of the week, the amount of activity on campus can be overwhelming. One could easily fill an entire day moving from lecture to lecture, cultural events, art exhibitions, dance classes, and concerts. When I do my daily e-mail check, I always take a cursory glance at the list, make mental notes about possible free food, and think wistfully to myself that under most circumstances I would certainly attend such and such an event if only I had the time. Well, on Tuesday there was listing that caught my eye, and I finally broke out of my passive stupor and took a small step further into the McCombs/UT community.
The event was called “Sweatshops and Consumerism,” a combination lecture/discussion hosted by Net Impact Undergrad, a socially and environmentally conscious student business organization. Having spent several years doing anti-sweatshop work, I was pretty eager to gauge UT students’ attitudes toward labor issues and to hear the type of perspective Professors Patricia Wilson and Harry Cleaver, the two main speakers, would bring to the event. Also, it was nice to give my brain a short break from accounting.
Overall, I found the structure of the event to be interesting. Both professors spoke about the political and economic factors surrounding sweatshop factories in Mexico, and there were several occasions for the audience to break into groups and discuss issues and pose questions. Professor Cleaver placed the sweatshop issue in a classical post-colonial Marxist context, viewing sweatshops as a natural offshoot of our modern political system. Professor Wilson presented a more holistic understanding of sweatshops in their local contexts, urging a more nuanced understanding of low wage off-shore manufacturing and emphasizing consumer choice as a possible solution to labor rights abuses. Almost all of the undergraduates in attendance were engaged with the issues, which made me happy. For a Tuesday evening, attendance at the dialogue was pretty impressive, with several dozen people in the audience, and there was a pretty good mix of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty.
The discussion was 90 minutes well spent, and my break from the library didn’t seem to bring my semester crashing down around me. With luck, I’ll be able to make time to take part in more campus events as the year progresses.