When corporations can shirk their responsibilities, and can cut and run to the cheapest workforce, nations become desperate to retain the jobs they can, whatever the social cost. For these workers, "free trade" is anything but that. They are denied their freedoms--freedoms of speech and of association--and denied their basic human rights by the same trade that enriches the people behind the WTO.

Are these workers protectionists? Are they against trade? Of course not.

But they know the kind of trade advertised as "free trade" comes at a tremendous price. And it is not the corporations who will pay. For the past two years, the Progressive Student Labor Movement's (PSLM) anti-sweatshop campaign has fought to turn Harvard and its apparel licensing from an appendage of corporate America into a weapon against globalization without representation--the WTO's brand of trade. Because the sweatshirts, baseball caps and T-shirts that bear our schools' names are made in sweatshops across the globe, we can fight international injustice where we live, and bring attention to the realities that the WTO ignores.

Students cannot accept a world where people our age are denied an education because they must work for pennies, without clean air, without clean water and without their rights. No trade is worth that.

If Harvard is to stop enabling oppression in developing nations like El Salvador, it must join the Workers Rights Consortium of other concerned schools. This organization operates on the principles of full disclosure and transparency. Harvard's membership in the Workers Rights Consortium's rival, corporate Fair Labor Association only lends legitimacy to a wildly compromised cover-up attempt.

And while the student anti-sweatshop movement has had a heartening string of recent successes, we wouldn't have to do this work at all if it were not for flawed organizations like the WTO.

We look forward to a time when the conditions of life in our world will not be determined by secret meetings in the corporate interest, but by considerations for human needs and political rights.