Glimpses of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

There have been, however, a number of criticisms of the agreement that produced GMIES and GMIES itself. While SETM1 signed the final agreement that created GMIES, ii was not part of the negotiations leading to that agreement, which took place solely
between the Gap and the NLC. Additionally, because the Gap’s code of conduct does not


provide for a living wage, workers are still paid only the inadequate Salvadoran minimum wage. Most problematically, SEMTI has never been able io conclude a collective bargaining agreement with Mandarin International. As a result, GMIES has io some extent displaced the union, as workers bring their complaints to GMIES, which then speaks io Mandarin’s management. Unlike a union, however, GMIES is not structured in a way that it is accountable to the workers; as part of maintaining its independence, il must be formally neutral between management and labor (Armbruster-Sandoval 2005; Brooks 2007; Esbenshade 2004b). Future attempts at creating independent monitoring organizations, such as the WRC, would try to address these faults.

This, then, was the state of anti-sweatshop around 1996. They had a keen understanding of the structural problems that lay ai the root of sweatshops, but were still

searching for strategies with which they could successfully bring pressure io bear on the core firms of the apparel industry. We have reviewed some of the more successful campaigns above, but there were many others that were less successful. And, even in cases of relative success, the story we saw with the Camisas Modernas plant is all too common—the union will win a victory, only to see it evaporate in a year or two as the factory is closed down, often to be reopened under a different name, sometimes
elsewhere, sometimes in the very same EPZ (Armbruster-Sandoval 2005}. And for every


factory where there is an international campaign to support workers, there are certainty many more where a workers’ struggle never gets off the ground or where they have no international contacts and must fight alone, an almost certain recipe for failure. On the other hand, there was an increasing popular consciousness about the sweatshop problem among consumers in the US. Even before USAS was founded, students on many college campuses were engaging in anti-sweatshop activism. And organizations such as UNITE were searching for new strategies they might use in the struggle. In the coming chapters, we will look at how UNITE and USAS essentially stumbled on a new method for fighting sweatshops, using the leverage of colleges as institutional consumers over the brand-name companies that had licensing contracts with them.
Chapter 4: The Political Economy of Higher Education