Several MSU officials and students will gather tonight to celebrate the affiliation of MSU with the national Worker Rights Consortium, or WRC - an organization that monitors and helps eliminate the production of university apparel in sweatshops.

The reception, which will take place at 7 p.m. in the Culturas de las Razas Unidas room in the basement of Wilson Hall, will recognize the five-year campaign to get the university to join the group, which was done by Students for Economic Justice, or SEJ, and Movimiento Estudiantil Xicano de Aztlan members.

This spring, MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon agreed to join the WRC, but the university wasn't officially recognized as an affiliate until July, SEJ member Neil Sardana said.

"This has been a five-year campaign and finally we've come to a victory," Sardana said. "This gives us an opportunity to move in a forward direction as far as getting MSU to stop using sweatshop labor and move to a safer means of production."

Currently, there are 145 colleges and universities affiliated with the WRC and now that MSU has joined the list, Penn State University is the only Big Ten school not affiliated.

MSU Board of Trustees member Dorothy Gonzales said she supported the university's involvement in the WRC, but felt it took too long to come to fruition.

"It's really difficult for me to understand why it took so long (to join)," she said. "Coming from a working class family and working in a migrant stream, I think everyone should be treated equally, and wherever they work they are safe and have the opportunity to move up to bigger, better things."

Sardana, who has been in SEJ for three years, said the event will not just focus on the past campaign but on the future of MSU's involvement with the WRC.

"We will be talking about the history of the campaign, what we did as students to fight and win this and talk about where we want to go from here," he said. "It's something that was needed a long time ago."