The first Student Labor Action Coalition was established in 1994 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to support the 700 locked out workers at the
A.E. Staley Company in
Decatur, Illinois. In February 1994, a group of undergraduates saw the video "Deadly Corn"in their UW-Madison sociology course, and angered by what they learned of the Staley workers' struggle for safe working conditions, they organized the Staley Solidarity Action Coalition. After a semester organizing a study group on the issue and taking a trip to Decatur, they changed their name to the Student Labor Action Coalition (SLAC) with the aim to help worker struggles wherever they occur. In their first year, the UW-Madison SLAC educated the campus community on the Staley lockout, participated in the Miller and Pepsi boycotts of A.E. Staley, traveled to Decatur, Illinois to attend labor solidarity rallies and helped spread similar support activities to other university campuses. By 1999, there were dozens of SLAC student organizations on campuses nationwide, working on a wide variety of worker solidarity campaigns. Many campus SLACs affiliated with the national organization,
United Students Against Sweatshops [http://usas.org/, after its founding in 2000. ==Notes==