Responsibility for Sweatshop Labour

Abstract

Abstract Drawing on Iris Marion Young’s work on responsibility for structural injustice, this chapter argues that (most of) those who are involved in the reproduction of sweatshop labour through their actions are politically responsibility. While individuals are not blameworthy for their implication in structural injustice, they are morally accountable should they fail to take up their political responsibility. This asks individuals to work towards changing the intersecting structures of oppression that make workers vulnerable. The chapter present three considerations of political responsibility: the social position of the agent and the nature of their connection to sweatshop labour exploitation, the link between concrete actions and radical structural change, and the importance of an anti-imperialist stance. The chapter closes by discussing the successful cooperation between a sweatshop workers’ union in Honduras and the US anti-sweatshop movement in 2007.