Glimpses of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

generally cover it only rarely, even if it is still a serious social issue (Ryan 1991). After a few years of salacious celebrity and brand-name scandals, the issue of sweatshops became “old news" and reporting on it decline dramatically.
Even when the media reported on such things as the Kathie Lee Gifford scandal, there were many problems with the coverage. Journalists consistently flamed sweatshops not as a systemic problem, but as an aberration, the result of a few bad apples (Brooks 2007). In the case of US-based sweatshops, such as the El Monte slave labor case, the media frame frequently put the blame on immigrants and immigration for making sweatshops possible, by creating a pool of easily exploited labor, rather then looking at the policies of the lead firms in the apparel industry (Ross 2004), a bizarre reversal of responsibility. This is part of a wider pattern in which journalists as social actors, positioned comfortably in the professional-managerial class and socialized in mainstream
institutions, tend to assume that the social system as it exists is basically sound. Thus, while they may call individual corporations to account for particular scandals, they rarely articulate a larger critique of the system in which corporations are embedded and which shapes their choices, pushing them to maximize profits by any means they can (Ryan 1991).
The media also consistently depicted sweatshop workers as victims, rather than active agents, fighting for their rights. In the case of this last problem, many have argued the NLC shares some of the blame, actively choosing sensational issues like child labor over the right to organize and freedom of association (Brooks 2007). The rules that govern the mass media arena, however, gave the NLC incentives to do so. Marion Traub-

Werner (interview, 2007), a USAS member who spoke critically of “National Labor Committee-type victimhood stuff," captured some of the dilemma faced by anti- sweatshop groups in dealing with news reporters and media audiences: “The victim stuff is just the easier sell, right? You know, people have forced overtime, beatings, all the sort of sweatshop horror stories that happen. [. ..] But even if they didn’t happen, the system is still totally fraught and fucked up." She pointed to the Camisas Modernas case as an example--there were no horror stories to tell, but workers’ rights were nonetheless being violated when the factory’s management resorted to union-busting. And, in terms of the bigger picture, while narratives of sweatshop workers as victims may generate media coverage, they obscure the systemic nature of the problem. USAS member Ken Abrams* (interview, 2007) said such early emphasis on victimhood “makes it harder, in some ways, to get press around stuff that is more common (...] like (violations of) the right to organize. It’s like this race to the bottom in terms of the most salacious thing which is needed to get media attention."
Nonetheless, whatever its problems, the press coverage of the mid-1990s helped the anti-sweatshop movement grow considerably. It also made clear io activists the power of attacking a brand-dependent company’s image, a tactic that was io remain a critical part of activists’ repertoires in future campaigns. Finally, the strategic model of the anti- corporate campaign, which helped generate this coverage, has remained central to the anti-sweatshop movement. Indeed, as we shall see, USAS’s origins lie in UNITE’s attempts to apply the anti-corporate campaign model in innovative ways.