Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns Research Articles

Steven Universe

Steven Universe

Conductive Activism: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns across Hong Kong and Mainland China

ABSTRACTThis study looks at trans-border, anti-sweatshop campaigns and the transformation of cross-border activism between Hong Kong and mainland China. Examining two cases, it demonstrates the mechanism and processes of trans-border, anti-sweatshop campaigns and networks involving non-governmental agencies, student groups and workers. The study suggests that anti-sweatshop activism has been conductive and transferrable from Hong Kong to China in a way that has mobilised local civil society power, cultivated mainland activists and nurtured localised pro-labour activism. With Hong Kong activists acting as movement conveyers and mainland activists acting as adapters, anti-sweatshop activism has evolved. Once centred on marketplaces and consumers, it is now centred on production sites, and has moved domestic actors (including workers, students, scholars, media and consumers) from the margins to the centre. Anti-sweatshop activism has moulded itself to local contexts by rebuilding its strategies and tactics while coalescing with overseas networks to integrate strengths across the Hong Kong-Chinese border. Although the anti-sweatshop movement in China has its weaknesses, its evolution has the potential to gradually alter the power asymmetries between domestic and overseas activists.

Hardware - Hard Work

In the past, anti-sweatshop campaigns have often focused on the apparel sector. More recently, these campaigns have broadened their spectrum as European NGOs increasingly begin to target technology companies producing smartphones and tablet computers, for example. This process comes with ambivalences, however: In the apparel sector, the importance of the local scale had been often unacknowledged. Within current campaigns targeting the ICT industries we can observe a decoupling of NGO driven activities on the consumer markets in the global north on one hand and labor struggles in the global south on the other. This does not only result in ineffective CSR-strategies, but it can also lead to a double victimization of female assembly line workers. The author discusses these contradictions and its implications for consumer focused tactics and coalitions between NGOs and trade unions. The article is based on the authors’ work with an NGO focusing on issues of labor in the ICT industry.

Explaining Dynamic Strategies for Defending Company Legitimacy: The Changing Outcomes of Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns in France and Switzerland

This article analyzes and compares the dynamically changing outcomes of anti-sweatshop campaigns in France and Switzerland through a qualitative comparative case study using interviews and analysis of firsthand and secondary data. In both countries, some targeted firms made early concessions and later withdrew from those concessions. To explain these changing outcomes over time, the article develops a perspective that puts emphasis on interaction phases and highlights corporate strategic responses to anti-sweatshop movement demands. Analyzing those responses as driven by legitimacy contests between companies and activists, the study explains why anti-sweatshop movements had significant outcomes early on and shows the mechanisms that allowed firms to withdraw from initial concessions at a later stage. In the course of changing interaction dynamics and contexts, companies developed strategies building on competing sources of legitimacy to circumvent movement demands. The companies thereby compensated for the legitimacy losses inflicted by their withdrawal from earlier concessions and the legitimacy deficits of other solutions. The analysis reveals three strategies firms used to achieve and compensate legitimacy and discusses their contextual combination comparing the two cases: inter-firm cooperation, ethical product labels originating in collaborations with competing social movement actors, and publicly fighting back against campaign makers.

Concealed Repressions: Labor Organizing Campaigns and Antiunion Practices in the Apparel Industry of Guatemala*

Research on antisweatshop mobilizations and labor-organizing campaigns in the countries of the global South has shown that under the pressure of transnational advocacy networks, notably NGOs and trade unions, US brands and retailers intervene in labor conflicts in their outsourced factories, in order to escape shaming campaigns. However, little attention has been paid to the responses of local employers to the emergence of labor organizations in their factories, partly as a result of these campaigns. This article, based on a two-year fieldwork project in the Guatemalan apparel sector, shows how the local managers of this industry manage to reconcile the demands of brands with the continuation of repressive labor control in the workplace by means of “concealed repression”; namely, preventive strategies, subtle antiunion discrimination, “opportune inaction,” and deliberate illicit transactions involving state officials.

Solidarity, Sexuality, and Saving Muslim Women in Neoliberal Times

Desiring SolidaritySolidarity is a fundamental-even constitutive-concern of feminist theory and politics. Like a specter it haunts feminist imaginations periodically. Yet it is a slippery term. Certain expressions of feminist solidarity, we know, often gloss over divisions the name of unity. The pursuit of solidarity along these registers, I suggest, expresses a longing as much as it represents a political goal.1 Perhaps this desire (for home? for the transcendence of privilege and so a point of arrival?) explains the persistence or at least periodic revival of a language of sisterhood that is otherwise discredited.The trope of global sisterhood is especially powerful today; its affective power allows for its reinvention different idioms at different times. Most recently, neoliberal discursive regimes Euro-America have revived both global sisterhood and a politics of salvation/caring, deftly folding them into corporate marketing strategies. So it is that, for instance, the Whole Foods grocery store chain solicits donations for its microcredit programs for women in the developing world, as part of its stated mission to produce a future without poverty. In the same vein, the French luxury cosmetics company Clarins's FEED 15 campaign, as an expression of its humanitarian values, provides meals to hungry children worldwide through the World Food Program.2 Both ventures appeal, different ways, to a global cosmopolitan feminist sentiment located the North. By implication, the present of women and children Europe and the United States excludes poverty and hunger.3In this short essay, I am mainly interested the discourses of solidarity and sisterhood opened up by the collapse of Rana Plaza Savar, Bangladesh, 2013, which over eleven hundred garment factory workers were killed. Not surprisingly, First World solidarity with Third World workers figured centrally the coverage following the disaster. As horrifying images of the tragedy and its aftermath circulated across global media, the incident was rendered a spectacle for consumption. Like other such events, it was open to the most incendiary mobilizations.The new socially conscious Pope Francis immediately denounced as slave labor the working conditions Bangladeshi garment factories (Bangladesh 'Slave Labor' 2013). A year later, at a conference convened by the International Labor Rights Forum called Women's Rights the Apparel Industry: Ending Violence, Empowering Voices, a participant declared, We want to take these women out of The head of the National Organization for Women, a rousing speech, also condemned as slave labor factory work places like Bangladesh and Honduras.It is not my intention to caricature individuals or impugn their motives. I do not doubt the sincerity of individual concerns, feminist or otherwise. My interest rather is the work of the trope of slavery. Like trafficking and forced labor, slavery performs a specific discursive-ideological function. Its persuasive power lies representing extremes such as the Rana Plaza collapse as being outside the legitimate liberal capitalist system rather than constitutive of the system itself.In contrast to such incendiary calls to solidarity, a more informed and nuanced transnational activism around sweatshop labor foregrounds the essential complicity of Northern corporations and Bangladeshi capitalists the making of incidents such as the Rana Plaza collapse. This is critical terrain, which labor activists Bangladesh work side by side with activists the United States.4 For the most part, however, antisweatshop campaigns hinge on the power of the affluent Northern consumer to save poor Third World women through the former's ethical consumption practices. Solidarity is decidedly vertical.The Marketplace of SolidarityAs indicated earlier, feminist solidarity of a neoliberal kind has been marketized the global economy. …

Movements, Markets and Fields: The Effects of Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns on U.S. Firms, 1993-2000

How do social movements influence corporations? Recent work suggests that movements can inflict material damage on their targets and shape categories of evaluation in organizational fields. Extending these ideas, we examine the effects of anti-sweatshop campaigns on sales, stock performance, reputation and specialized ratings of U.S. firms, using fixed-effects regression models and event study methods. The analysis demonstrates that social movements can in some circumstances shape both the markets and fields that firms inhabit. Specifically, anti-sweatshop campaigns (1. had negative effects on sales (though only among certain types of firms), (2. influenced stock prices, and (3. shaped specialized ratings of corporate responsibility. They also diminished previously positive corporate reputations (to a modest degree) but did not radically alter reputational hierarchies in the business community.

Multinationals and Anti-Sweatshop Activism

During the 1990s, anti-sweatshop activists campaigned to improve conditions for workers in developing countries. This paper analyzes the impact of anti-sweatshop campaigns in Indonesia on wages and employment. Identification is based on comparing the wage growth of workers in foreign-owned and exporting firms in targeted regions or sectors before and after the initiation of anti-sweatshop campaigns. We find the campaigns led to large real wage increases for targeted enterprises. There were some costs in terms of reduced investment, falling profits, and increased probability of closure for smaller plants, but we fail to find significant effects on employment. (JEL F23, J31, J81, L67, O14, O15)

Sewing and Exploiting the American Dream

Sewing and Exploiting the American Dream Caroline Waldron Merithew (bio) Daniel Bender . Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 272 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3337-6 (cl); 0-8135-3338-4 (pb). Margaret M. Chin . Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 197 pp. ISBN 0-231-13308-1 (cl). Laura Hapke . Sweatshop: The History of An American Idea. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 202 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3466-6 (cl); 0-8135-3467-4 (pb). The garment industry is global but the sweatshop is "all-American." The three works reviewed in this essay add scholarly depth to historical and current debates about the repercussions of ready-made clothing and its production. Read together, Daniel Bender's Sweated Work, Weak Bodies, Margaret Chin's Sewing Women, and Laura Hapke's Sweatshop provide an historical and analytical framework that explains the rise, meaning, longevity, and critique of the garment trades from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. Though Bender, Chin, and Hapke each address the topic with distinct methodological approaches, the books complement each other in three ways. First, the authors make contributions to women's history by placing gender at the center of their analyses, and by considering how male and female subjectivities intersect with class, ethnicity, sexuality, and race. Second, they show the significant role women played in the intense competitive local markets that became an important part of globalized capitalism. And third, these scholars complicate the notion of the "American dream" by uncovering the ways it was sustained by patriarchy (and the naturalization of male and female roles within this system). With their books, Bender, Chin, and Hapke have made significant contributions to the field. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies is working-class history at its best, because it perceptively melds a Marxist feminist approach with cultural studies theory to explain change over time. Bender takes readers from the late Gilded Age through the early New Deal period in two parts—the first focuses on the interplay between immigrants, racial identity, and gender, and the second [End Page 180] scrutinizes the discourse of and about women workers as part and product of the sweatshop. The term sweatshop came into use in the 1880s with the inundation of southern and eastern European immigrants in the United States. Sweatshop was a malleable idea that hinted at a multiplicity of things—all eliciting fear, empathy, anger, and concern. For example, as an idea, it referred to a place of labor, i.e., tenement quarters that doubled as home and workshop. It also highlighted the experience of laboring in cramped, filthy, and loud spaces. And sweatshop connoted a certain type of worker and the way he or she worked. Southern and eastern European immigrants, with family ties in the industry, made up the majority of the labor force. They were tired, exploited, and sick as they sewed a garment piece over and over again. They worked as fast as they possibly could but still barely earned enough money to feed themselves or their children. The sweatshop idea was also historically constructed. By sustaining gender throughout the narrative, Bender convincingly shows that the ways that the sweatshop was conceived of shaped the debates surrounding reform. The author argues that while multiple groups (male and female workers, Progressives, inspectors, and government agents among them) all agreed that the sweatshop was a problem, they disagreed about the nature, cause, and solution to its existence. Middle-class reformers initially worried that immigrants were the cause of the conditions in the sweatshop. Inspectors, for example, made racist arguments about enfeebled and diseased Jews who not only undermined the potential of American capitalism but were sure to cause its demise. By the early twentieth century, however, the divergent groups came together in a coalition based on gender: "For workers, their bodies bore the scars of class exploitation; for inspectors, workers' bodies revealed their inferior racial status. In forging alliances, workers—led by male unionists—and inspectors exchanged these languages for a shared language of gender" (187). Anti-sweatshop discourse pivoted around women's presence, position...

Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea by Laura Hapke and Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti‐Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor by Daniel E. Bender

Sweatshop: History of an American Idea Laura Hapke. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor Daniel E. Bender. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Laura Hapke's book Sweatshop: History of an American Idea and Daniel Bender's book Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor are complementary works both published in 2004 by Rutgers University Press. Bender covers the topic from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s; while Hapke starts in the 1940s and continues to the present. first part of Hapke's book, The Surveyed, depicts the sweatshop's development from the Massachusetts Lowell Mills of the 1840s to New York's Lower East Side tenements of the 1890s. Gender differences concerning sweatshops are made apparent by the authors, particularly in terms of the role of men and women in the sweatshops and in labor organizations such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Hapke focuses on the role of women after the Shirtwaist Strike of 1909-1910 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, in which 146 people died in a modern tenement built without sanitation and safety considerations. While the sweatshop workplace was condemned by the 1920s, the idea lived on among many workers into the 1930s. Hapke's second part entitled Sweatshop Aesthetics details the New Deal's pictorial treatment of the sweatshops and their workingclass subjects in the chapter called Newsreel of Memory: WPA in the Great Depression. Hapke takes the idea and substance of the sweatshop into the post-World War II industrial and postindustrial world. New ethnic and racial groups, blacks, Asians, and Latinos, replaced the Jews and Italians. While the Age of Affluence (1945-1953) was the time of the unionized sweatshop, the sweatshop jobs were quickly outsourced, immigrant labor serviced new illegal sweatshops, and increasingly Americans worked in postindustrial service jobs. Older unions, particularly the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the ILGWU, merged to form UNITE, an organization pledged to unionize the new sweatshops in American, but as Hapke points out Americans disagreed about the nature of the modern sweatshops, as witnessed by the controversy revolving around the 1998 Smithsonian Institution's exhibit Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of Sweatshops 1820 to the Present held at the National Museum of American History. …

Regulating Clothing Outwork: A Sceptic’s View

By applying the strategies of international anti-sweatshop campaigns to the Australian context, recent regulations governing home-based clothing production hold retailers responsible for policing the wages and employment conditions of clothing outworkers who manufacture clothing on their behalf. This article argues that the new approach oversimplifies the regulatory challenge by assuming (1) that Australian clothing production is organized in a hierarchical ‘buyer-led’ linear structure in which core retail firms have the capacity to control their suppliers’ behaviour; (2) that firms act as unitary moral agents; and, (3) that interventions imported from other times and places are applicable to the contemporary Australian context. After considering some alternative regulatory approaches, the article concludes that the new regulatory strategy effectively privatizes responsibility for labour market conditions - a development that cries out for further debate.

Hapke, Laura. Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 208 pp. 22.95 (paperback)./Bender, Daniel E. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 288 pp. $23.95 (paperback).

Hapke, Laura. Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 208 pp. 22.95 (paperback)./Bender, Daniel E. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 288 pp. $23.95 (paperback).

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor

Bender, Daniel E. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies. Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey [etc.] 2004. x, 272 pp. Ill. $62.00. (Paper: $23.95.)

B<scp>ender</scp>, D<scp>aniel</scp> E. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies. Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey [etc.] 2004. x, 272 pp. Ill. $62.00. (Paper: $23.95.)

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor; Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor; Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor (review)

Reviewed by: Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor Allison L. Hepler Daniel E. Bender . Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. x + 272 pp. Ill. $62.00 (cloth, 0-8135-3337-6), $23.95 (paperbound, 0-8135-3338-4). Sweatshops, an integral part of the global economy today, evoke images of exploited workers laboring under poor working conditions, not unlike the sweatshops of a hundred years ago in this country. According to Daniel E. Bender, what we learn from the antisweatshop campaigns during the Progressive Era can help us understand and combat these workplaces today, despite many differences. In this powerfully written book, Bender reminds us of both the importance and the limitations of cross-class coalitions and gender differences in creating conditions for improvement. Emerging, as they did, during the growth of the "modern factory," antisweatshop campaigns, he argues, became a tool for promoting the modern capitalist system and for institutionalizing a marginalized female workforce. By focusing on the weaknesses of workers' bodies caused by sweatshop conditions, these campaigns also medicalized workplace health and safety, another aspect of modern capitalism. The most important contribution of Bender's book, however, is its depiction of how various groups coalesced around sweatshop regulation and/or elimination, each using its own language and methods. For instance, while Jewish immigrants described sweatshop workers as victims, factory inspectors viewed sweatshop conditions as a sign of Jews' racial inferiority and degradation that threatened the rest of society. And, since middle-class consumers often bought what was made in these sweatshops, it was in their best interest to improve [End Page 599] conditions lest they purchase manufactured goods that might carry filth and, more importantly, contagious disease. Key to coalition-building, according to Bender, was an understanding of women, especially those involved in homework, as transient workers. Thus, the language of gender difference, employed by women workers themselves as well as by male factory inspectors and male immigrant workers, was an important element in the cross-class antisweatshop campaigns. Indeed, Bender's analysis of gender is so central to the book that its subtitle might more accurately be "Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Gender" rather than "Languages of Labor." Nevertheless, argues Bender, coalitions have their limitations. Specifically, strikes in the first and second decades of the twentieth century created factionalism within the unions, most notably the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Factionalism, he argues, particularly the introduction of Communist union leadership, led to the demise of the coalition. Employers used it to flaunt health and safety regulations, and factory inspectors found themselves increasingly unable or unwilling to ally with the union leadership. Bender also demonstrates that the strikes of the 1910s and 1920s created female activists who increasingly viewed themselves as "real workers" and not just "women workers," worthy of all the rights of their male counterparts. Women workers, however, despite or perhaps because of the cross-class alliances that had been formed among women for improved working conditions, also used the language of sexual difference, referring to themselves as temporary workers. The norm among these communities was the male as breadwinner and the female as future mother. These alliances, particularly between women in the ILGWU and the Women's Trade Union League, and their belief in gender difference, also contributed to the inability of workers to formulate a strong class-based antisweatshop coalition. This book is written for labor historians. Bender's story certainly adds a chapter to the history of occupational health and safety, but despite his emphasis on how workers' bodies became an important site for the antisweatshop campaigns, most of his evidence and arguments focus on organizing. That said, however, historians of medicine are to be reminded of how health concerns become significant political and economic tools, as they did during the antisweatshop campaigns, particularly when this reminder is placed alongside the book's graphic depictions of working conditions among the immigrant Jewish community. Bender also reminds us to pay attention to the lessons of the past as we create antisweatshop campaigns in the twenty-first century. Allison L. Hepler University of Maine at Farmington...

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor. By Daniel E. Bender (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 288pp.)

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor. By Daniel E. Bender (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 288pp.)

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor (review)

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor (review)

Reclaiming America: Nike, clean air, and the new national activism

Acknowledgments Introduction Part One: Reclaiming America outside the Electoral Process: National Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and the Movement for a Living Wage 1. Just Don't Buy It: Challenging Nike and the Rules of the Global Economy 2. From Challenging American Sweatshops to a Movement for a Global Living Wage Part Two: Reclaiming America through the Political Process: National Environmental Activism and the Pentagon Redirection Campaign 3. The New National Environmental Activism 4. The Pentagon: Reclaiming America by Giving Peace a Chance Part Three: Resources for National Activism: Community-Based Organizations, the Media, and the Internet 5. Community-Based Nonprofit Organizations: From Demobilizers to Agents of Change 6. The Media: Mobilizing through the Echo Effect 7. The Internet: Mobilizing in Cyberspace Conclusion Notes Index