In order to better ensure that apparel bearing the Harvard name is produced under quality working conditions, the University will affiliate itself with the Fair Labor Association (FLA), a new organization planning to monitor clothing factories around the world, a University official said yesterday.

Seventeen other colleges and universities, including all the Ivy League schools, have also indicated their intentions to affiliate with the FLA, which was created in November by the Apparel Industry Partnership (AIP), a national coalition of groups working against sweatshops.

The FLA will not be fully operational until early 2000.

The announcement comes one week after the University said it would institute a "full disclosure" policy regarding the location of factories producing Harvard licensed apparel.

Students in the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) have been agitating for the University to take measures against sweatshop labor for months. Last Tuesday, anti-sweatshop protesters joined in a 250-person campus rally outside University Hall with campus activists for two other causes.

According to University Attorney Allan M. Ryan Jr., recent steps against sweatshops were less a response to student protests than the result of private discussions held with students over the past several months.

Ryan said this move was only the first step in the University's commitment to addressing the sweatshop issue.

"This may or may not prove to be an effective answer...but it didn't seem to do any harm to join and support it," Ryan said.