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By Tara Zahra

August 6, 1999 | It seems kids these days just don't know how to throw a revolution. The only picket-worthy injustice at Georgetown University is a slow Internet connection, reported Dolly McMamus in the Washington Post last winter. And from the dejected slacking of "Reality Bites" to the 20-somethings in fabulous apartments dominating today's primetime lineup, apathetic, apolitical and downright self-absorbed young people have become default pop-culture archetypes.

So when a movement protesting the use of sweatshops in the manufacturing of college apparel erupted on elite college campuses nationwide this spring, it's no wonder the press was surprised. The New York Times called it the biggest wave of campus activism since the anti-apartheid rallies of the '80s. Student agitators have been the subject of articles in Time, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, Business Week, the Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor and the Nation. Critics have decreed that it's the '60s but smarter. Harvard law student Aaron Bartley notes that today's activists aren't torn apart by the infighting that plagued their parents' movements.

Protests have now surfaced on about 100 campuses nationwide since 1997 -- including the notoriously unactive Georgetown. And unlike other perennial student issues or organizations -- Take Back the Night, for instance -- this one has gone beyond merely raising awareness. After sit-ins at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and University of Wisconsin at Madison, administrations have agreed to support stricter regulations for apparel manufacturers. New York University, Michigan and UNC have declined to join the White House-backed Fair Labor Association due to pressure from students and unions, who claim the organization of apparel manufacturers, retailers and human rights groups, formed to investigate sweatshop abuses, is too heavily dominated by industry. Nike recently responded to student pressure by agreeing to disclose its factory locations overseas, a key demand of the movement.

Meanwhile, a parallel campaign focusing on fair pay and organizing rights for campus workers has developed at Harvard, Brown, Fairfield, Stanford, the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins, where the first campus living wage measure was recently implemented. Moreover, activists are becoming increasingly connected, and are taking steps to insure that the movement doesn't lose steam over the summer break: This July, United Students Against Sweatshops brought together students from around the country for a conference on how students can better coordinate on a national level, and how they can spread the momentum to regions such as the Southeast, where sweatshop activism has not yet taken hold. Marc Cooper concluded in the Nation that students today seem "more prepared, more studied, even more radical in their economic critique than their SDS ancestors."

Next page | But the apathy myth lingers