Sit-in in South Building enters 10th Day

The sit-in at South Building (offices for the UNC administration) which began last Thursday has now entered its tenth day and second weekend. Seven students are currently locked-in for the weekend, under constant police guard, demanding that Chancellor Moeser join the 42 universities nationwide which have adopted the Designated Suppliers Program. The DSP is an improvement on the anti-sweatshop policies which UNC adopted in 1990 after another sit-in, and would guarantee that factories producing UNC logo apparel paid their workers a living wage, and that workers at those factories had some sort of collective organization.

Students are keeping their own blog about the sit-in at http://dsp4unc.wordpress.com, with daily video updates.

The DSP has been endorsed by 18 campus organizations, both the Chatham and Orange County democratic parties, UNC's Progressive Faculty Network, the North Carolina AFL-CIO, Black Workers for Justice, North Carolina's UE-150, and the Graduate and Professional Student Federation, among other groups.

Last Wednesday, after nearly a week of student protest, the Chancellor reversed an earlier outright refusal to consider the program and scheduled an emergency meeting of the Licensing Advisory Committee, scheduled for next Friday. But after three years of working through the committee on this issue, and three years of the Chancellor's refusal to give any of the reasoning behind his opposition, students chose to maintain their presence in South Building and keep increasing pressure until the Chancellor adopts the program.