Glimpses of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

Central America, there may be racial harassment as well. Armed guards may be present to keep workers in line, with the police available to back them up when the guards alone cannot bring sufficient force to bear to repress workers (Bonacich et al. 1994; Brooks 2007; Klein 1999; Pangsapa 2007; Ross 2004).
While the El Monte and Gifford scandals called some attention to these facts, media coverage soon petered out. It was enough, however, to spark an interest in anti- sweatshop activism in some sectors, including among college students. Independently, over the course of the 1995-1996 school year, anti-sweatshop groups sprang up on a number of college campuses, fueled by concern that their schools were doing business with companies who profited from sweatshop labor. Eric Dirnbach (interview, 2007), then a graduate student at the University of Michigan, told me,
There was really nothing going on around campus about that ^[issue] _and
there was some news coming out, the Kathie Lee scandal and some other things about some Nike problems with sweatshop factories in Indonesia and other Asian countries, so we decided we were going to try to do

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something about that. [....] We protested at football games, and had some meetings with the administration, etc. Our demands were a little incoherent at that point--it basically was drop the Nike contract or get them to do the right thing. If was not quite clear to us at the time exactly what the right thing would be.
This lack of coherence appears to have been common among student anti-sweatshop activists at the time. In addition to being unsure of their exact demands, in many cases, they did not have a clear plan for pressuring the administrators of their school. They might organize a piece of street theater on campus to raise awareness of the issue of sweatshops, but they did not necessarily have a clear idea about how that might translate into a long-term plan for changing college policy.
Roughly ten years later, over the summer of 2005, a national student anti- sweatshop group, United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) convened a meeting, which included people not only from other US anti-sweatshop groups, but anti-sweatshop activists from across the globe. Their goal was to come up with a plan that would allow them to force major apparel companies to change their business practices, particularly the fashion in which they outsourced their manufacturing, something that lies at the root of the problem of sweatshops. Their goal, in other words, was to devise a plan that would bring about major structural changes in the industry. The product of this meeting was the Designated Suppliers Program (DSP), in which companies doing business with participating schools would be required io source a certain percentage of their clothing for those schools--initially 25%, but eventually 75%--to particular factories, which had

been certified by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent monitoring organization, as being generally respectful of workers’ rights. While this was certainly ambitious, there was no reason for USAS and its allies io think ii was totally unrealistic. They had already pressured over 150 colleges and universities into adopting codes of conduct meant to guarantee labor rights and then persuading those schools to join the WRC, which would act as the enforcer of these codes. Indeed, USAS and its allies had founded the WRC for this very purpose.

Clearly, the US student anti-sweatshop movement had evolved significantly over ten years. They had gone from being a network of somewhat only loosely connected groups on various campuses to a national organization that many considered to be at the cutting edge of the US anti-sweatshop movement as a whole. They had also gone from being unclear on how to effectively pressure the administrators of their own colleges to designing a detailed plan to alter some of the basic business practices of the major firms of the apparel industry, behemoths of the corporate world such as Nike and Reebok.
In seeking to understand how this dramatic development happened, current scholarly theories of social movements offer us little guidance. Quite simply, they have relatively little to say about the ways in which social movements strategize and therefore little to say about how a group’s strategy might evolve so much over the course of ten years. Instead, at least until recently, movement scholars have focused on the individual tactics movements have used--such actions as street theater, rallies, petitions, sit-ins, etc. Much of this work has produced valuable insights into how groups select their tactics and the effects these tactics have. This research has, however, largely neglected the larger
question of strategy, not looking, for instance, at how different activists link different tactics into a larger plan and what the effects of those tactics in interaction with each other are. Without this, it is hard to get a grip on how the student wing of the anti- sweatshop movement evolved from using scatter-shot protests and guerilla Shearer to devising an ambitious plan on the scale of the DSP. Over the course of this dissertation, I will look at the strategic evolution of the US anti-sweatshop movement, with a particular focus on USAS and the WRC.
Understanding how they developed a coherent strategic plan and how their strategy evolved over time will give us a deeper understanding of not only this movement in particular, but of how movements in general create their strategies. I will also consider why looking at strategy as an integrated set of practices is important—what dynamics it brings to light that considering tactics and other actions by social movements, such as organizing and framing messages, in isolation does not illuminate. The anti-sweatshop movement has been successful in pan because they have looked at all these issues in an interconnected fashion--unlike some activist groups (including some activists I interviewed before they connected with the larger movement) who think only tactically, coming up with ideas for creative actions, but nor thinking about how they form part of a larger, organized line of attack against those power-holders responsible for the injustices they oppose. Understanding how movements can think strategically is important, for both scholars and activists, since doing so seems likely to dramatically increase their odds of success.

“Tactics” and “strategy” are two terms commonly used in one breath, as if they were largely synonymous. I would argue, however, distinguishing between the two calls our attention to an important aspect of how movements operate. In particular, it can highlight the ways in which activists draw on the diverse range of actions with which they are familiar to craft a larger campaign or plan. A tactic, as I define it here, is a discrete action that a social movement organization (SMO) can take that is modular (that is. standardized and repeatable)-something such as a rally, a sit-in, street theater, or

strike. I define strategy, on the other hand, as the process by which SMOS and networks


of allied SMOs seek. in the context of unequal power relationships, to develop sets of interlinked practices flat will allow them to alter the larger social system, in particular seeking to alter the balance ^{of power} in their own favor and in those of the social groups they represent. These interlinked practices include assessing the opportunities and constraints in their larger social environment (Alimi 2007; Koopmans 200'i; McAdam 1999; Tarrow 1998), mobilizing people through movement organizations (Morris 1984), forming alliances with other groups (Bandy and Smith 2005; Bystydzienski and Schacht 2001}, framing their ideas for a larger audience (Ferree et al. 2002; Ryan 1991; Snow and Benford 1988), and selecting a particular set of tactics to use to pressure authorities
(McAdam 1983; McCammon et al. 2008; Tarrow 1998; Tilly 1978). In other words, strategy covers the range of actions, including the individual tactics scholars have long studied, a movement consciously takes to reach its goals—and the process by which movement activists select those particular actions and combine them into a larger whole.