Glimpses of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

Independent Monitoring

Out of the agreement between the NLC and the Gap that ended the former’s campaign against the latter came the industry’s first agreement to sei up an independent monitor to check on the conditions in a factory. Although this agreement has been criticized on a number of grounds, independent monitoring has become a central strategic model for the anti-sweatshop movement, with USAS and the WRC considerably refining it beyond this first attempt.
As popular awareness of the many environmental and social problems caused by TNCs under neoliberalism grew, calls--both mom within and outside of the corporate sector--for corporate codes of conduct and programs io monitor their implementation grew in a wide range of industries. Advocates of monitored codes as a means of promoting corporate social responsibility point to the Sullivan Principles, a code of conduct which applied to US firms doing business in apartheid South Africa, as the first instance of such a program and a model for others. There is some irony in this, since both the US and South African anti-apartheid movements took a dim view of the Sullivan Principles, regarding them as a way for companies to save face while avoiding what the movement actually wanted them to do--pull our of South Africa altogether. Additionally, companies’ compliance with the Sullivan Principles was measured by Arthur D. Little, an accounting firm with no expertise in human rights, by means of a process that even the firms involved complained was non-transparent. At the end of the day, it appears that beyond encouraging companies to contribute to clarities in black neighborhoods, the Sullivan Principles had little real impact on the situation in South Africa. The real change

came when the threat of divestment by colleges (under pressure from student activists) caused companies to completely withdraw from the country. It was the resulting economic crisis that lead white South African business leaders io pressure the apartheid government to negotiate an end to the racist system with the African National Congress (Seidman 2005, 2007).

Despite this lack of apparent effectiveness (or perhaps because of it), codes of conduct and monitoring programs have become popular among corporations who want to make a show (whether serious or superficial) of being socially conscious. There is, however, a great deal of variation in such codes and monitoring programs. Some are little more than a facade, simply meant to allow an industry to present itself as socially responsible while doing very little. Other monitoring programs are genuinely independent affairs that have brought pressure to bear on companies to address labor rights abuses among their suppliers (Esbenshade 2004b; Seidman 2007). We will explore this more in the chapters nine and ten, when we look at the differences between the corporate- sponsored Fair Labor Association and the independent Worker Rights Consortium.
In the wake of the bad press generated by the Gifford and other, similar scandals, a number of core apparel companies began to adopt codes of conduct for their suppliers. Most lead corporations initially claimed that they had no responsibility for the working conditions ai their contractors’ factories. These contractors were, after all, independent businesses and the lead firms could not very well be expected to know what went on there—or such was their argument (Klein 1999). They soon recognized that these claims would not only fail to appease the anti-sweatshop movement, but even many average


consumers concerned about the reports they saw in the news. Thus, many brand-name firms such as Nike and the Gap began to adopt codes of conduct as a way of protecting their brand image. Even in the best of cases, however, the follow-through on implementing them has been uneven, while in the worst cases, it has been virtually nonexistent. Still, such codes can give activists some framing advantages in the mass media--if they can argue that a company is failing to live up to its own proclaimed standards, that can be especially damaging to the company in question (Esbenshade 2004b).
Independent monitoring of such codes entered into the strategic conversation of the anti-sweatshop movement as a result of the campaign targeting Mandarin International and the Gap described above. As noted, the Gap was one of the many firms that had adopted a code of conduct for its suppliers; the NLC used the failure of Mandarin to live up to the Gap’s code as one of the weapons in its framing campaign against the Gap. And part of the agreement the NLC reached with the Gap as a result of the campaign was the creation of an organization--the Independent Monitoring Group of El Salvador (Grupo Monitoreo Independiente de El Salvador or GMIES)--to monitor whether or not Mandarin was actually complying with the Gap’s code. GMIES itself consisted of four local, Salvadoran organizations--the University of Central America Human Rights Institute, the Legal Aid Office of the Archbishop of El Salvador, the Archdiocese of San Salvador, and the Center for Labor Studies. These in turn reported their findings io a number of US organizations, including the NLC and the Independent Monitoring Working Group, which included the Gap. GMIES was able to make regular,

unannounced inspections and met with workers privately (off of company grounds), both important conditions for getting an honest sense of what is actually happening in the factory. Most of the fired SETM1 members were rehired and many of the more abusive conditions they had to endure were brought to an end (Armbruster-Sandoval 2005; Brooks 2007; Esbenshade 2004b).