Glimpses of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

Chapter 3: The Beginnings of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

The Rise of Transnational Activism


The rise of outsourcing and sweatshops did not go unchallenged by social justice activists. And, given the global nature of the problem, they found that they needed to organize globally themselves to have any hope of successfully challenging such labor exploitation. More precisely, sweatshop workers have found themselves in a position, where, even if they are well organized, they can do little to exact concessions from their employers. As we discussed in the last chapter, these factory-owners are not in a position to make concessions, since any increase in the cost of doing business could well put them out of business. The real power to improve conditions lies with the lead apparel companies in the Global North, who are the ones demanding that these factories they production keep costs as low as possible. Thus, sweatshop workers need to challenge these core companies as much as their own, peripheral employers if they wish to improve then working conditions. Unfortunately, there is little they can do to exert direct pressure on core firms. All tm often, the major apparel corporations respond to labor disputes at their contractors by “cutting and winning”—moving production to another factory where there is no open labor conflict which might attract unwelcome media attention. Therefore, if sweatshop workers want to successfully fight to improve their conditions, they have to find allies in the home countries of the apparel firms--that is, in the US and Western Europe—who may be able to find ways to successfully exert leverage over these companies. The result was the birth of transnational anti-sweatshop alliances and campaigns, which we will examine both below and in chapters twelve through fourteen.


This rise of the transnational anti-sweatshop movement was part of a larger trend of transnational movement-building, as more and more activists in more and more movements came to see this as the most viable means to exert leverage over their foes. Such transnational relationships within social movements go back as far as the nineteenth century, with the global anti-slavery movement and the frequent communication that happened between the feminist and labor movements in different countries. Transnational ties increased dramatically, however, in the late twentieth century, facilitated by advances in telecommunications and transportation technology that made forging and sustaining such ties easier. The first such transnational movements formed around human rights issues in the l970s. Activists in countries such as Chile and Argentina that were ruled by utterly ruthless military governments who were willing io kill and disappear any and all dissenters found that they had little or no leverage over their own governments. They could, however, pass information on human rights violations io allies in the US, one of the main backers of these repressive regimes. US activists could in turn publicize this information and put pressure on their own government to withdraw support from the Chilean and Argentine juntas. Such activism seems to have played a rule in reducing US support for such governments and facilitating the transition to formal representative democracy (Keck and Sikkink l998).
Activists’ hopes that such formally democratic governments would be friendlier to them were soon dashed though. Constrained by IMF/ World Bank conditionalities as a result of the debt crisis and often dominated by internationally oriented sectors of local capital, many, if not most, of these governments had neither the power nor the interest in


implementing social-democratic reforms (Robinson 2003). Faced with such conditions, activists continued io rely on transnational networks. Indigenous rights activists, for instance, formed alliances with first-world environmentalists to pressure the World Bank to modify its lending policies. These campaigns had only a limited impact on the ground, but did result in the Bank at least formally committing to reviewing projects it lent to for environmental sustainability and respect for indigenous peoples’ rights (Keck and Sikkim 1998).
In the 1980s, most of these transnational networks were formed on an ad hoc basis, focusing on specific campaigns. In the 1990s, these networks began to take on a more permanent character. Perhaps the most visible sign of the thickening of these networks were the major conferences that activists held, unified around a broadly defined opposition to neoliberalism. While activist groups had long used UN conferences as an opportunity to hold parallel conferences of their own and form ties with each other (Smith et al. 1997), the mid-1990s saw activists begin to set up their own conferences entirely independent of the UN. More radical groups who would not be caught dead at UN-sponsored conferences not only attended these, but often played a key role in them. The first such independent conference was the 1996 Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism or encuentro, organized by the Zapatistas, a radical indigenous movement based in Chiapas, Mexico. During this meeting, activists from around the world came to desperately poor Mayan Indian communities in the middle of the Lacadon Jungle, far from any urban center of power, to network with each other. A series of other encuentros followed, some in Zapatista territory, others elsewhere. The encuentros were eventually

succeeded by the World Social Forums, the first of which was held in 2001 in Porto Allegre, Brazil, attracting a somewhat wider range of groups--including more moderate ones--than had attended the Zapatistas’ gatherings. Both the encuentros and World Social Forums served as sites for left-wing activists from around the world to build ties and trade ideas with each other. Another sign of the thickening of transnational left networks was the rise of several permanent activist groups that are transnational in scope and goals. Among the more significant are Jubilee 2000, a predominantly church-based network dedicated to the total cancellation of third-world debt, with many of the more radical member groups calling for reparations from the former colonial powers to their ex- colonies; People’s Global Action, a worldwide alliance of radical leftists, ranging from small anarchist groups in the US to massive grassroots organizations like the Movement of the Landless Workers from Brazil; and Via Campesina, an international alliance of small farmers and peasants, opposed to both the WTO’s agricultural policies and agribusiness in general.

While people in the Global South were well aware of this rising transnational activism, it did not really gain visibility in the US--even among leftist circles--until the massive protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington in late 1999. It seems to be around this time that people began defining a wide range of Ieft- leaning networks and campaigns as constituting a unified, if very multifaceted and heterogeneous, movement. Some, particularly the movement ’s critics, have referred to ii by the rather inappropriate name of the anti-globalization movement; its supporters are more likely to speak of a globalization from below, the global justice movement or the
alter-globalization movement. Regardless of what one wishes to call it, the anti- sweatshop movement was one of the activist networks that arose within this context of growing transnationalism and became one of the constituent movements of the larger global justice movement. Although much of this dissertation focuses on the student wing of the anti-sweatshop movement, its origins actually lie in international labor and religious networks; students were only brought into the movement later in the game.
During the Bretton Woods era, the major US labor federation, the AFL-CIO had seen itself as business’s junior partner, identifying with its interests in many ways, a strategy known as business unionism (Moody 1997). One aspect of this was that it generally sided rather blindly with the US government during the Cold War, including offering it support for the often violent repression of progressive unions by governments allied with the US, all in the name of anti-Communism. As a result, the US labor movement had very poor relations with all but the most conservative unions in much of the third world (Armbruster-Sandoval 2005). The AFL-CIO’s leadership’s understanding of themselves as business’s junior partner left them unprepared for the neoliberal assault on the New Deal social compact. Instead of fighting against the concessions business demanded from labor, the AFL-CIO’s leadership grudgingly backed them. They bought into business leader’s arguments that such concessions were necessary to make LIS business competitive in the age of globalization. They also tended to assume that such
austerity would be a temporary phenomenon, lasting until US businesses regained their footing, and that the era of generous wages and benefits would eventually return (Fantasia and Voss 2004; Moody 1997).

This, of course, never happened. The old guard leadership of the AFL-CIO was seemingly incapable of understanding that a fundamental shirt in capital’s relationship with labor had happened and responding accordingly. Fortunately, however, there had always been progressive currents pushing for a reform of the labor movement from within the movement. The set-backs due to globalization gave the reformers more credibility and the culture of the US labor movement gradually began to change, taking on a more confrontational, progressive character . Among their major strategies were community-based campaigns, in which unions forged ties with non-labor groups, such as religious congregations and students, and framed their struggles in terms of a broad, social justice-based agenda, as opposed io a narrower one focus on union members’ interests alone (Fantasia and Voss 2004; Moody 1997).

Nonetheless, some of the labor movement’s early responses to globalization were embarrassingly protectionist and conservative in nature. Brooks (2005, 2007), for instance, critiques a campaign in the early 1990s by the AFL•CIO and some of its allies, supposedly focused on ending child labor in the Bangladeshi garment industry. They organized the campaign, however, without actually consulting Bangladeshi labor and children’s rights activists. In these activists’ eyes, the legislation, which would have banned imports made with child labor, would do more harm than good, because ii failed to address the root causes that lead families to be desperate enough to send their children to work in factories. They saw it the campaign as a thinly veiled push for protectionist legislation by the US labor movement. As a result, the Bangladeshi activists ended up in a strange alliance with Bangladeshi factory-owners in opposition to the legislation.

Brooks concludes that, while the reforms that eventually resulted from this campaign had some positive impact, they ultimately left much to be desired. (We will discuss this campaign in more depth in chapter fourteen.)

Happily, the US labor movement began to move away from such protectionist impulses io strategies more genuinely based on solidarity, in large part due to face-io-face contacts between US labor activists and those from various parts of the third-world, often at the rank-and-file level. Such contacts were actively encouraged by reform groups within the US labor movement. For instance, Labor Notes, a left-wing labor periodical, helped facilitate ties between reformist currents in the United Auto Workers (UAW) of the US and the Ford Worker’s Democratic Movement, an independent labor union in Mexico’s maquila sector (Moody 1997). Particularly relevant for the roots of the anti- sweatshop movement was the involvement of labor activists in the Central American solidarity movement of the 1980s. This primarily church-based movement opposed the Reagan administration’s numerous and bloody proxy wars in the region, pushing for the US to cease supporting repressive military governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, and, in Nicaragua, the Contras fighting against the socialist Sandinista government.
Among other things, the churches involved sent missions to Central American countries to see the effects of the war firsthand. Some of the church members who went on such delegations were also labor activists. Their experiences there lead them to question the AFL-CIO’s blind support for US foreign policy. They also observed the ways in which the Guatemalan and Salvadoran governments repressed progressive labor unions and promoted Export Processing Zones--and thus fostered a climate in which sweatshop labor

was rampant. These religious and labor activists became instrumental in forming some of the first US anti-sweatshop organizations, such as USLEAP and the National Labor Committee (NLC) (Brooks 2007; Seidman 2007).

As these things were happening at the grassroots level of the US labor movement, shifts were also happening in its national leadership. Even during the heyday of business unionism and Cold War loyalties, there had been some union locals with progressive leadership. Ironically, these unions tended to the older, traditionally more conservative craft unions, which were often highly decentralized, giving room for more diversity in local leadership. As it became clear that simply clinging to old-style business unionism was getting the labor movement nowhere fast, reformers began to exert more influence, coming to assume positions of leadership in some national unions. This culminated in the 1995 election of the New Voices slate, lead by John Sweeney, to the national leadership
of the AFL-CIO. Sweeney and his allies began to push for a more confrontational approach to dealing with business, more aggressive organizing strategies, and building ties with non-labor movement groups. The new leadership was only partially successful in this since many of the national leaders of the AFL-CIO’s constituent unions were still part of the old guard, unwilling to change and risk losing the base of their power. Still, significant shifts in the US labor movement were taking place (Fantasia and Voss 2004).
Among the seniors where these changes took place was the apparel industry.

There were two major unions in this sector--the ILGWU, whose membership consisted primarily of poorly paid immigrant workers; and the Amalgmated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), whose membership consisted of somewhat better paid native-

born white and black workers, working in the less fragmented parts of the industry. With the movement overseas, both saw their memberships dwindling. In response to this, in 1995 the two unions engaged in a somewhat messy merger, forming the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE); and began undertaking aggressive community-based campaigns, trying io form alliances with non-labor groups such as religious congregations and students, in their campaigns to pressure apparel firms such as Guess (Bonacich 2002).

Another important development at the national level was Sweeney’s attempt to break with the AFL-CIO’s Cold War past in its relationship with third-world unions. ln 1997, Sweeny shut down the American Institute for Free Labor Development, which had worked closely with the US government in promoting its Cold War policies, and reopened it as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), popularly known as the Solidarity Center. Although still criticized by those to its left, the new Solidarity Center has played a much more constructive role in promoting labor rights globally and building alliances between the AFL-CIO and independent labor unions in the third world.