University of Notre Dame President the Rev. Edward Malloy signed on to the Workers Rights Consortium yesterday, adding the university to the more than 70 member schools in the sweatshop monitoring organization.

Dennis Moore, Notre Dame director of public relations and information, said the school is hoping to take a leadership role in the WRC, although it will continue its relationship with the Fair Labor Association.

The FLA is a White House-sponsored coalition of corporations and human rights groups that has been criticized by anti-sweatshop activists as being too pro-business.

A primarily student-driven coalition designed to enforce codes of labor conduct in the production of collegiate apparel, anti-sweatshop activists across the nation have been pressuring the WRC since its inception.

"There"s no doubt they take different approaches," Moore said. "We think that the approaches of both have merit. It"s an enormous problem and we"re willing to be part of any approach that we think canmake a difference in the lives of workers."

Several other schools, including the University of Michigan, are members of both organizations.

Regardless of its dual membership, Notre Dame is a powerful ally for the WRC. Because it is a private institution, no exact figures on how much licensing revenue the school takes in was available, but Moore said it would be fair to say that Notre Dame and the University of Michigan are the two most popular brands of collegiate apparel.

"This is a tremendous victory for the WRC and hundreds of thousands of garment workers throughout the world," said WRC governing board member Peter Romer-Friedman. "It"s a testament to the great work the WRC has done recently supporting workers rights in Mexico that one of the largest licensed logo universities has decided to join the WRC"s efforts."

Moore said Notre Dame will also continue to focus on their own initiatives, which he described as being beyond both of the national organizations.

Notre Dame, he said, was one of the first major licensing schools to adopt a code of conduct for manufacturers in 1997, which has since been implemented in every one of their labor contracts. Adidas and Champion are the college"s major licensees, he said.

Notre Dame"s code, he said, is one of the few codes to ban a licensee from producing in a country that does not allow their workers to freely organize. Notre Dame has also established the Collegiate Living Wage Association and is doing its own monitoring of factories in Mexico and Central America.

Aaron Kreider, a member of the Progressive Student Alliance at Notre Dame, said the group was happy about the decision to join the WRC, but has been disappointed at what they perceive as administrative attempts to exclude students.

Kreider said although two students are on the task force, they are not members of his group, which have been the primary advocates for the WRC.

He added that he hopes Notre Dame will be more forthcoming in the information they have gathered during their monitoring trips and company disclosure results.

But overall, today is one of the "biggest victories our group has had," Kreider said.