No Sweat! at IU first started as part of a campaign sponsored by the local chapter of Jobs with Justice (JwJ), in the spring of 1999. A graduate student named Kenneth Miller in that group started it up, as he had been following the national anti-sweatshop movement and wanted to see it get started here at IU, too. Over the summer Kenneth met Amber Gallup, who had been a student activist in Amnesty International and other organizations here on campus for about six years. They started to work on organizing the "student wing" of what they envisioned would be a broad coalition of labor activists, community activists, members of the faith community, and diverse student groups, with the student group of No Sweat! being the main force behind organizing and strategizing for this broad-based coalition campaign which was called "Sweatfree IU".

The first major task of No Sweat! was to educate the campus and community. Through the fall of 1999 and into the spring of 2000, we gave educational presentations to countless classrooms, churches, student and community groups. Feel free to check out our presentation, Sweatshops and the Global Economy, and use it yourself.

We initiated negotiations with the university administration, asking first for full public disclosure of factory locations, which we won in November of 1999. (This link will take you to the list of factories producing IU apparel.) We then heightened our campaign to get IU to join the Workers' Rights Consortium (WRC), and negotiated with the administration on our Code of Conduct, which is what IU now must hold its licensees accountable to. We won both of our demands because of the power we had build as a student/labor/faith/community alliance and also because the administration understood it was the right thing to do.

Spring 2000 was an exciting time for No Sweat! and USAS nationally. Students across the country were escalating their campaigns to sit-ins. When IU joined the WRC in March of 2000 along with University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Michigan, only a handful of schools were members. These three large Universities joining was a huge victory for the WRC. The number of schools joining the WRC increased every day leading up to the founding conference on April 7, 2000 in New York City. Several No Sweat! members and IU administrators attended. Currently, there are 73 colleges and universities that are members of the WRC.

We continue to be a very active student group, continuously addressing new issues that we feel we should act upon, such as the corporatization of the university. Educating the campus and larger community is still a top priority for No Sweat! — bringing Jim Keady and Leslie Kretzu from the Living Wage Project to speak here this February, for example. We're also working to make sure that IU follows through on their commitment to the WRC and holds their licensees accountable — the recent situation at the Kukdong factory in Mexico and the letter Myles Brand sent to Nike have been really important first steps. This is just the beginning — the WRC is starting to do its work and the universities must step up to the plate as well.