Thinking About the Antisweatshop Movement
Isaac, Jeffrey C.
IN THE PAST two years an antisweatshop movement spearheaded by students has swept across U.S. campuses. Student groups, most of them affiliated with a national organization called United...
...And it suggests that we should be wary of overgeneralizing about the conservatism of the corporate university...
...So they promote specific efforts, what Dirlik calls "local experiments," as part of a broader vision of change...
...Anticorporate activism," she writes in No Logo, "enjoys the priceless benefits of borrowed hipness and celebrity—borrowed, ironically enough, from the brands themselves...
...The Movement as It Is 1. To begin with, the antisweatshop movement is an exemplary sign of both student idealism and a resurgent idealism within the activist leadership of the American labor movement...
...The governing board works according to majority rule...
...This latter demand has proved the most controversial, for it involves a repudiation of an alternative group, the Fair Labor Association (FLA), whose formation was brokered by the Clinton administration and its Apparel Industry Partnership, and whose board includes the very corporations whose factories it is supposed to monitor...
...and by Nike and Reebok, which have chosen to deflect bad publicity by taking (some kind of) remedial action...
...Crucial roles were played by the International Labor Rights Fund, which belongs to FLA but has an unquestioned legitimacy as an independent labor rights group...
...they are positively harmful, misinterpreting what has been accomplished and setting unrealistic expectations...
...It consists of a small number—one or two dozen—of dedicated and strategically located worker rights groups in places such as Guatemala and Thailand...
...And USAS activism is clearly at least in part the fruit of the AFL-CIO's Union Summer Program and other union efforts to reach out to college students...
...The FLA, they claim, is a sham because it is corporate controlled...
...Though the movement focuses much of its ire on the new hypermobility of capital, the anticapitalist rhetoric of its leaders fails to appreciate what is truly new about post-Fordist accumulation and about postmodern politics and culture—its flexibility and its fluidity...
...Together these constituents are committed to ending specific abuses through publicity and ingenious negotiation with companies like Nike...
...As a result, many participants begin thinking in terms of good capitalists versus bad capitalists rather than developing an anticapitalist consciousness...
...Steel...
...It does not promise, and it cannot deliver, a new regime of labor rights in those places where labor rights are not codified...
...In spite of this ideological antagonism, the FLA can be seen in part as an effort to co-opt the pressure that USAS, along with other antisweatshop campaigners, has successfully generated on campuses and in the broader society...
...Student groups, most of them affiliated with a national organization called United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), have called attention to sweatshop labor abuses at factories producing sports apparel with university-licensed logos— a multimillion dollar industry for universities— and have demanded that universities seek an end to such abuses...
...Second, the multiple investigations began, and, although they diverged in some respects, concurred that serious abuses had taken place and that remedies were necessary...
...Within a short period of time, the WRC kicked into gear and USAS activists across the country publicized this incident and pressed universities to enforce their codes of conduct...
...Further, the WRC is committed to remedying labor abuses through negotiation with contractors, and it is opposed to a corporate strategy of "cutting and running" from factories in violation...
...But there are equally important practical-strategic reasons to be skeptical: meta-narratives about the anticapitalist significance of the antisweatshop movement are not simply misleading...
...Like the internet itself...
...For the movement—and the Worker Rights Consortium that has been its principal achievement— is based, it seems to me, on the following distinct nonrevolutionary premises: (a) our society is saturated with brand name consumerism, and this is unlikely to change in the near future...
...The antisweatshop movement, in other words, is both in and of the system of globalization whose effects it contests...
...The truth of Posner's observation is shown by the labor crisis still unfolding in the Kuk Dong factory in Puebla, Mexico, that produces sports apparel for Nike and Reebok...
...This effort, undertaken primarily during the 1999-2000 academic year, involved an ingenious combination of tactics, from direct action campaigns and sit-ins at major universities such as the University of WisconsinMadison, to teach-ins and public relations campaigns, to savvy negotiation with university administrations...
...Klein notes the weakness of such activism: [T]here is no question that the communication culture which reigns on the net is better at speed and volume than at synthesis...
...The second is solidarity with those who labor under sweatshop conditions...
...d) corporations such as Nike and Reebok make billions of dollars selling such merchandise, and, because their brand names help them to market their goods, and because their profits rely in part on their university contracts, they can be pressured by socially concerned universities into remedying labor abuses if the right combination of strategies is applied...
...Scarce time and resources make it impossible to effectively monitor, publicize, and remedy labor abuses at all of the thousands of factories—run by subcontractors, labor intensive, easily closed down and moved to other locations if "labor trouble" arises—that operate throughout the world...
...And it makes use of the new Internet technologies and new forms of networking pioneered by flexible capitalism to do its business...
...Third, Nike and Reebok have taken some initiative—under serious pressure to be sure—to end shopfloor abuses, to have striking workers reinstated, and to make possible a relatively fair union election...
...Such activists have hegemonic, or rather counter-hegemonic, ambitions...
...The WRC's practical vision, in other words, is neither revolutionary nor radical...
...The allegations included low wages, unsafe working conditions, the use of child labor, and the physical maltreatment of workers...
...His latest book is Democracy in Dark Times...
...The mobilization of public sentiment against corporate power has clearly produced impressive results...
...For while these campaigns, boycotts, and demonstrations are usually quite emphatic about what they oppose—Nike factories, Starbucks cafés, IMF policies, WTO mandates—they project neither a compelling alternative vision nor a serious political movement capable of vying for political power...
...Student idealism is either lauded for its passion for justice or disparaged for its naivet...
...The campus antisweatshop movement is a partial, limited, and fairly modest effort, capable of producing only partial, limited, and fairly modest results...
...Soon thereafter four Kuk Dong workers contacted the WRC to outline these abuses and to request assistance...
...Such corporations are attacked for their greed, but rarely analyzed in terms of their role in creating a new, postindustrial and postmaterialist culture with global reach that generates a politics of tactics and shifting alliances rather than of long-term strategies...
...b) the continued flourishing of Nike, Reebok, and other purveyors of these typically superfluous consumer items...
...Much of the literature on the antisweatshop movement falls into two fairly predictable genres—activist celebration and conservative or neoliberal disparagement...
...Nothing about this process has been perfect...
...This narrative does not hew to dogma...
...Nike, through the FLA, also commissioned Veritê, a private monitoring organization, to undertake a more complete investigation of the Kuk Dong situation...
...The Limits of the Movement Although USAS and its allies may talk about putting an end to sweatshop labor and struggling against global capitalism, the WRC is really about remedying specific abuses as they arise in specific locales and, in a broader sense, about publicizing labor abuses and seeking to enlighten consumers and citizens...
...There is some forward movement, and USAS and the WRC can feel good about their role...
...I drafted a widely circulated faculty petition at Indiana UniversityBloomington— signed by more than a hundred faculty within two weeks—supporting IU's negotiation with No Sweat...
...There is no global response to globalization...
...It is not a mass social or political movement...
...The overall result of these efforts is a national campaign with significant momentum...
...The first is that the wholesale commodification of labor is a moral evil that ought to be opposed by all conscientious individuals...
...And his view makes much sense...
...these networks] are infinitely expandable systems...
...We may well be witnessing the birth pangs of a new order...
...This can only be assured through some kind of negotiation with corporate management...
...Such an approach represents "a haphaz ARGUMENTS and and piecemeal mess of crisis management," and it is antipolitical in its disregard of legal mechanisms and of the political power to change the law...
...and affiliate with the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), a group established in 2000 to assure monitoring of factories by independent, on-site grassroots worker groups and their international nongovernmental organization supporters...
...There are only partial responses, of the sort embodied in the WRC...
...The FLA's premise is that corporations, labor and human rights supporters, and universities can collaborate constructively...
...It is, in short, a campaign rather than a movement, an attack on a certain category of capitalist abuses rather than an attack on capitalism itself...
...It does not describe anticapitalist struggle as the necessary outcome of the dialectics of history...
...In such a society, individuals lose solid identity...
...adopt codes of conduct requiring that contractors agree to produce only in factories where sweatshop labor abuses have been remedied and where workers are free to organize...
...T T HERE ARE good theoretical reasons to be skeptical of the more grandiose claims often made on behalf of the antisweatshop movement, for the prospects for a serious alternative to corporate capitalism are quite dim...
...As one USAS activist put it, "The deDISSENT / Fall 2001 n 103 ARGUMENTS mands we posed in Wisconsin reflect a growing movement taking place on campuses today...
...the FLA, which helped to broker the interests of Nike, Reebok, and the local factory management, and supported the ILRF involvement and the Verite investigation...
...not without conflict, but under the same overarching logic...
...Where tensions between ideology and practicality have surfaced, USAS has opted for practicality—a sign, I would suggest, of its political maturity...
...Labor loses its collective identity, becomes increasingly individualized in its capacities, in its working conditions, and in its interests and projects...
...This decision played an important role in the subsequent decisions of the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison to affiliate with the WRC...
...But it did not pass alone...
...102 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 4. The WRC is not a mass organization, nor do its constituents form a mass movement...
...As one sympathetic journalist put it, "the FLA represents a compromise with corporations" that students and universities have no reason to make...
...For the antisweatshop movement is a partial, improvisational, and bootstrapping effort to develop a moral response to human indignity, and to effect marginal change in the labor conditions of workers for whom even marginal changes can make a world of difference...
...is asked ever less frequently, and if when asked it tends to be quickly dismissed on the grounds of a TINA (There Is No Alternative) creed, this is not so much for the lack of ideas as it is [for lack of] agencies which could conceivably carry them out...
...International solidarity," she writes, "is becoming so dependent on logos that these corporate symbols now threaten to overshadow the actual injustices in question...
...At the same time, Nike and Reebok sought some mediation of the labor conflict and an investigation of their own...
...They pursue these negotiations from what can only be described as relative weakness...
...They commissioned a Mexican labor attorney associated with the International Labor Rights Defense Fund to investigate and to open lines of communication with both management and workers...
...In fall 2000 reports of labor abuses in the Kuk Dong factory began to circulate among antisweatshop activists...
...If the student success in pressing this result is extraordinary, the willingness of university administrators— sometimes under duress but also, to be sure, under minimal pressure compared with the student activism of the sixties—is equally extraordinary...
...Nonetheless, there does seem to be a dominant narrative, articulated by writers and publicists, that frames the campus movement as part of a broader anticapitalist struggle...
...Although such a politicized consumerism represents a genuine form of empowerment, it also has serious drawbacks...
...Labor is disaggregated in its performance, fragmented in its organization, diversified in its existence, divided in its collective action...
...It is becoming part of the movement of global solidarity against the rule of corporate power...
...Although antisweatshop activists might like to imagine that their hands are clean of "compromise" with corporations, this is not the case...
...But the most serious abuse concerned the suppression of efforts to form an independent union, the harassment and firing of union activists, the violent breaking of a strike, and the expulsion of the many hundreds of workers involved in the strike...
...Klein cannot bring herself to draw this conclusion...
...3. The campus antisweatshop movement does challenge the effects of capitalist globalization and the corporatization of the DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 101 ARGUMENTS university...
...5. The university members of the WRC are corporate universities in every sense of the term...
...it means the development of new networks of finance and production that simultaneously corrode the power of nation-states to regulate accumulation and the organic solidarities that have historically supported such forms of social democratic regulation...
...The movement then, at its best, can generate only modest effects...
...The success of USAS—typically working along with supportive faculty and other allies— in getting universities to support such an organization has been nothing short of extraordinary...
...The movement has affinities and overlaps with a range of cross-border labor solidarity efforts—from Press for Change and Global Exchange to the Campaign for Labor Rights and the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras—that have been spearheaded by citizens, clergy, and union leaders...
...These critics don't question the radical aspirations behind the movement...
...It has produced much that is good...
...It is not possible for an organization such as the WRC to do more than this, for it is essentially a monitoring organization that offers support to workers who labor under repressive conditions, lack independent union representation, and are subject to labor law regimes that do not afford them very much freedom of association...
...If this is right, the same social structures that produce the harms against which the antisweatshop movement works also function to undermine the possibility of a global oppoDISSENT / Fall 2001 n 1 0 5 ARGUMENTS sition...
...b) just as the mass consumption of logo items is promoted by massive corporate advertising campaigns often linked to college and professional sports teams and events, so the abuses behind these items can be exposed through publicity campaigns that exploit the symbolic power of logos and brand names...
...The goal is nothing less than a radical transformation of global capitalism...
...But it is an unusual kind of challenge...
...The institution of responsibility-centered budgeting, the move toward temporary and part-time faculty and the use of graduate student instructors, the ascendancy of professional schools within universities and the corresponding crisis of liberal arts education, the ascendancy of a consumerist model of curricular choice—all this is well documented...
...But it has thus far failed to generate any significant programmatic political alternative to the neoliberal status quo...
...There are nonetheless reasons to be profoundly skeptical about this scenario...
...The WRC, then, is a monitoring group and a direct link to sweatshop workers and union activists...
...If this style of activism is an adaptation to the culture, then the culture that forces such adaptations needs to be taken seriously: it resists precisely the kind of synthesis that she believes is necessary to oppose global capital...
...and (c) the continued existence of serious global labor disparities and indeed even sweatshop labor conditions beyond the reach of effective remediation through the WRC's methods...
...It is a surfer's approach to activism, reflecting the internees paradoxical culture of extreme narcissism coupled with an intense desire for external connection...
...The most that it can promise is that when workers have serious complaints it will listen and try to make others listen, and that when such complaints are verified it will encourage universities to seek remedies...
...108 DISSENT / Fall 2001...
...But they may be the most realistic way to assist sweatshop workers and to effect some improvement in sweatshop labor conditions in the absence of powerful political movements capable of advancing strong legislative agendas...
...For many activists, the movement corresponds to what Arif Dirlik of Duke University has called a "resistance to capitalism" that is intended to serve as a "building block for the future...
...It is capable of getting tens of thousands of people to meet on the same street corner, placards in hand, but it is far less adept at helping those same people to agree on what they are really asking for before they get to the barricades— or after they leave...
...This analytic failure is ironic, for in some ways the diverse forms of antiglobalization activism, including the antisweatshop movement, are symptomatic of this new environment...
...It requires for its successful operation some working relationship with the corporations that it seeks to monitor and change...
...The FLA is thus at odds with the central premise of the student-supported WRC—the idea that corporations and their subcontractors cannot be trusted and that independent monitoring is essential to the achievement of labor rights...
...The first regards the voluntarism that it shares with the antiglobalization movement more generally...
...My basic point is that although the antisweatshop movement responds to some of the problems thrown up by globalization, it is a mistake to view it as a global challenge to corporate capitalism or an incipient form of radical political transformation...
...For this reason, even the best case scenario for the WRC would seem to involve (a) the continued mass production and consumption, on a global scale, of overpriced Nike and Reebok apparel and sporting goods...
...Teleology gives meaning to their efforts...
...The rhetoric of global anticapitalism has long served this function, and for some it serves this function today...
...For these reasons, I believe that skepticism can contribute something important to current strategic discussions about the antisweatshop movement and its long-term significance...
...trade unions to global labor rights...
...Even when such moralism can be avoided, she continues, the antisweatshop movement essentially relies on civil society initiatives, corporate codes of conduct, and mechanisms of voluntary compliance...
...five representatives of the University Constituency, which is organized as a university caucus...
...The FLA is corporate controlled...
...But this is no reason to disparage it, as there is little reason to believe that anything more grandiose is currently possible...
...The factory, at Nike's urging, eventually allowed this team access to the factory and its workers (unsurprisingly, confidential access to workers within the factory remained difficult, and the WRC investigating team, while tolerated by management, was hardly welcomed...
...But such remedies also require collaboration between the WRC's university members and corporate managers and some measure of trust among independent monitors, workers, and management...
...If the first constituent group provides the moral and political energy and the second provides the economic "weight" and substantial funding, the latter group provides the labor expertise and the ties to local workers that make the report ARGUMENTS ing of abuses and their subsequent independent monitoring possible...
...a few American trade unions—most notably the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), which provided crucial early support to the formation of both USAS and the WRC—in possession of resources, expertise, and organizing zeal, but also stretched thin by declining memberships and proliferating challenges...
...Internally, however, this movement is rapidly changing...
...One reason is the tension, noted by sympathetic left observers, between the distinct 104 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 themes and strategies of the antisweatshop movement and the global struggle against capitalism with which it is often linked by antisweatshop activists...
...What Castells describes at the level of social structure is also analyzed by Richard Sennett at the level of social psychology—the "corrosion of character," the erosion of social and political identities, the development of a new ethos based on the premise of "no long term...
...It is governed by a board of directors that consists of six industry representatives, six representatives of labor and environmental groups, and a single representative of the more than one hundred affiliated universities (plus one executive director...
...Martin HartLandsberg, for example, writing in Monthly Review, argues that while many of the recent expressions of opposition to capitalist globalization hold great promise, "there is nothing automatic about the future direction of political developments...
...As Manuel Castells observes: the social relationships between capital and labor are profoundly transformed...
...the IU USAS group), a negotiation that led to IU's decision to affiliate with the WRC...
...While she is quite wary of efforts prematurely to unify or impose discipline on these tributaries, she remains hopeful, indeed convinced, that this unification will come about...
...Most often it is portrayed as a movement of students against sweatshops...
...But such conflicts are not inconsistent with negotiation or even with some forms of constructive, if mistrustful and wary, cooperation...
...The danger of activism centered on exposing malign corporate logos is that such campaigns might "degenerate into glorified ethical shopping guides...
...For while this rhetoric may represent a new form of hipness, and surely resonates with various tactics of "resistance," it does not resonate with the public at large or point toward a substantial political movement...
...Yet she credulously believes that it will produce 106 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 a new anticorporate "synthesis...
...Indeed, their criticism seems geared toward helping the antisweatshop movement to see the limits of its strategies so that it might over time better advance its radical objectives...
...For although these parties have moral standing and some economic weight, they lack the financial resources, the organizational unity of purpose, and the sheer power of the corporations with which they deal...
...F F 1 VENTS IN Kuk Dong are still unfolding, but some conclusions are possible...
...Klein notes this in her essay "Does Protest Need a Vision...
...Klein's basic point, like Hart-Landsberg's, is that the antisweatshop movement is not necessarily as radical as its activists believe...
...There can be no doubt that, to the extent that changes have been instituted or initiated, it is only because pressure has been brought to bear by workers on the ground and by their antisweatshop supporters associated with USAS, the WRC, and DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 107 ARGUMENTS other solidarity groups...
...The dispiriting political consequence of these developments is nicely summed up by Zygmunt Bauman: a situation in which sovereignties have become nominal, power anonymous, and its locus empty...
...The antisweatshop movement, he argues, is too moralistic, too issue-specific...
...First, it is committed to the in ARGUMENTS vestigation of worker complaints, which requires that contractors allow WRC monitors access to their factories...
...Indeed, the laudable WRC goal of empowering sweatshop workers to form independent unions also involves the establishment of regular collective bargaining arrangements between these unions and management...
...I have thus spent much time and intellectual energy thinking about the sweatshop issue and its significance...
...Instead, it sees it as an aspiration, a historical project, a way of rectifying undeniable global inequalities...
...Even should abuses be remedied at specific sites, similar scarcities of time and energy make it impossible for the WRC to furnish real institutional guarantees that backsliding will not occur...
...as with all things online, we are free to dip in and out, take what we want and delete what we don't...
...Thus we witness the absence of a politically powerful left within the advanced societies and within the world as a whole...
...In many respects the verdict is not in regarding change at Kuk Dong...
...The board works on the I00 n DISSENT / Full 2001 basis of a qualified majority rule principle that gives effective veto power to the industry representatives...
...If the traditional question 'What is to be done...
...She correctly criticizes those who disparage the new activism for what it is, but she wrongly refuses to accept it for what it is, and to recognize the anachronistic quality of much of its anticapitalist rhetoric...
...Flexible accumulation means more than the ability of capital to move wherever the conditions of exploitation are most favorable...
...The WRC, in short, is a consortium that supports the work of labor NGOs in labor-repressive locales...
...The proximate goal of the WRC is thus to involve corporate universities in negotiations with corporate giants such as Nike and Reebok, so that the billions of dollars worth of consumer goods marketed by these behemoths in our consumer society can be produced under marginally less exploitative labor conditions...
...Its participants share no single narrative or interpretation...
...It is motivated by two moral principles...
...They seek what writer David Harvey has called a new "synthesis" of struggles against capitalist globalization, linking the campus antisweatshop effort to other corporate campaigns—like the campaign against Starbucks—and to protests against the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank...
...For this reason, the FLA is anathema to USAS, a hostility that is reciprocated by the FLA and especially by its corporate affiliates, who have disparaged USAS and the WRC as "ideological" and "unprofessional...
...Many view it as part of a broad global challenge to capitalism itself...
...And the results it can and does achieve are eminently good ones...
...But the FLA is not a sham because it is corporate controlled, for we live in a corporate controlled economy...
...Klein, for example, sees the antisweatshop movement as a tributary in a larger stream of anticorporate efforts that together are beginning to form "a citizen-centered alternative to the rule of the brands...
...And politics increasingly becomes a sphere of appearances emptied of real content, centering on mediated spectacles and celebrity events and electoral campaigns organized on the logic of mass advertising...
...The students' greatest success has been their ability to press many major universities to affiliate with the WRC, thereby committing to the principle of independent monitoring and agreeing to provide financial and moral support to sweatshop workers and to labor and human rights groups that support them...
...This is what the WRC represents and this is what USAS has helped to create...
...I have served as an IU representative to the founding conference of the WRC in New York and to the University Caucus meetings in Chicago, and I am an active member of the IU Sweatshop Advisory Committee...
...Perhaps this is why the Guatemalan worker organization COVERCO, a constituent member of the WRC Advisory Board, also belongs to the FLA...
...First, the light focused on this incident by USAS activists and the WRC made a tremendous difference and brought public and corporate attention to the issue that it would otherwise never have received...
...But in neither case is the real political significance of the movement soberly considered...
...Strangely, this is not a problem that has received much attention from the partisans of global anticapitalist activism, for whom, it seems, corporations like Nike, Starbucks, and Microsoft are essentially no different than General Motors or U.S...
...JEFFREY C. IsAAc teaches political science and directs the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University...
...Yet these universities are also unique spaces in the society, for they have, at least in principle, certain pedagogical and civic goals that allow for fairly robust forms of social criticism and make it difficult for their rulers to remain immune to serious moral chal ARGUMENTS lenge...
...IN THE PAST two years an antisweatshop movement spearheaded by students has swept across U.S...
...The Kuk Dong situation was the first test for the WRC, and it passed...
...It might promote a kind of intellectual and political flexibility that is supremely appropriate for the flexible times in which we live...
...USAS activists have been active in anticorporate globalization protests in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere...
...It is not a government, nor does it have the enforcement powers of governments...
...The assessment of the feasibility of actions and the practicality of projects is a function of the relative strength of the agent and its adversary...
...The WRC is a unique organization, a consortium consisting of three distinct and autonomous constituent groups—USAS students, universities (principally university administrations), and an advisory council consisting of human rights and labor NGOs and unions...
...and more than seventy universities and colleges, usually represented in the WRC by administrators who are often legal or financial officials and are most definitely not social activists...
...But Klein cannot have it both ways...
...Networks converge toward a meta-network of capital that integrates capitalist interests at the global level and across sectors and realms of activity...
...It is connected to no powerful political parties or even national labor organizations in any place other than the United States (and it would be a mistake to exaggerate the commitment of even the most progressive U.S...
...and they are in the process of developing a new, flexible form of organization that is closely tied to the new forms of flexible accumulation in the broader society...
...Good cop/bad cop strategies do not and cannot produce dramatic shifts in the balance of power between classes or dramatic improvements in the conditions of sweatshop workers...
...They have asked that universities require contractors to disclose the locations of all of their subcontracted factories...
...Indeed, student activists are to be credited for their pursuit of such a strategy, which has been developed in an intelligent way in spite of the discomfiting ideological compromises it has sometimes entailed...
...for] which no clear answer is in sight, is the query "Is anybody capable of doing whatever needs to be done...
...The author wishes to thank Purnima Bose, Myles Brand, Ira Katznelson, Debra Kent, Mark Levinson, Jo-Ann Mort, Scott Nova, Damon Sims, Matt Turassini, Iris Young, Michael Walzer, and especially Ray Franklin for their comments on this article...
...She points out that the new activist model "mirrors the organic, interlinked pathways of the internee" She treats this decentralized activity as an ingenious adaptation to changes in the broader culture...
...In this context he notes with dismay that "some antisweatshop campaigns come dangerously close to presenting sweatshops as an historical anomaly that can be ended by using consumer campaigns to encourage capitalists to change their behavior...
...Activists often need to believe in a goal radically unlike the present, to frame their activity around a grand narrative of good and evil, progress and reaction, what might be and what is...
...In an article in the Nation, Liza Featherstone explicitly drew this connection, arguing that this student movement represents a challenge to the " corporatization" of the university...
...It is meliorist...
...Indeed, it is precisely because of this indeterminacy that serious discussion and debate are so important...
...They are in many ways unedifying, especially when compared to more dramatic activities such as picketing Starbucks cafés or demonstrating against the IMF...
...A similar point is made by Naomi Klein...
...In both respects it aims to empower workers...
...In response to this pressure Nike and Reebok agreed to investigate the allegations...
...To the extent that this project is advanced in a pragmatic spirit, as a hypothesis about probable causes and links among various activities, it is impossible to pronounce final judgment on it...
...It exploits the mass media to publicize labor abuses...
...Although the WRC commits itself to the remedy of verifiable sweatshop abuses, it is incapable of putting an end to sweatshop labor conditions...
...As a spark of idealism fanned by politically sophisticated union leaders, the student movement is a very promising development...
...This is not necessarily the way many of its activists see their endeavors...
...The WRC sent a team of investigators to Kuk Dong...
...The WRC governing board consists of fifteen members— five representatives of USAS...
...What I hope to offer below is precisely this—a serious consideration of the movement's significance and limitations...
...It is too credulous about what it is possible to accomplish and about the power of righteous activism to effect progressive change...
...It may be necessary...
...Talk about government, talk about values, talk about rights—that's all well and good, but talk about shopping and you might really get our attention...
...And this is good...
...The modesty I propose is not very inspiring...
...The WRC, in short, is not anticorporate in function...
...Consider some of the basic commitments of the WRC...
...It promotes a maximalist approach to the remedy of specific abuses and it makes for moralism and binary thinking about alliances and strategies...
...Who are the owners, who the producers, who the managers, and who the servants, becomes increasingly blurred in a production system of variable geometry, of teamwork, of networking, outsourcing, and subcontracting...
...Indeed, in some ways the Kuk Dong process seems to epitomize the classic good cop/bad cop routine, with the FLA playing the good cop and the WRC playing the bad cop (with USAS functioning as the baddest of the bad), and factory management stuck between them...
...As applied in the Kuk Dong affair, this approach is a model for political activists and for intellectuals in the university...
...c) contemporary universities are corporate universities that derive substantial income from licensing their logos to the corporations that mass market sports-logo items, and the corporate interest of such universities in continuing to do this can be the basis for their involvement in promoting more decent labor conditions...
...2. The antisweatshop movement is a response to new forms of globalization based upon the hypermobility of capital and the development of ever more integrated global consumer and financial markets...
...But it is also misleading...
...and under present circumstances the main question...
...What is lacking among many activists, he argues, is a serious consideration of political strategy focused on the challenges to building a truly oppositional anticapitalist movement...
...But these activists also understand that global capitalism cannot be challenged head-on...
...S UGH STRATEGIES may not appeal to many antisweatshop activists, who may prefer a more antagonistic and ideological posture, in which the moral boundaries separating good and evil are more clearly drawn...
...And it is also, alas, a failed rhetoric, without much appeal to those ordinary citizens at whom it is aimed...
...more than a hundred student groups across the country, each of which typically consists of less than fifty activists, and each of which can mobilize no more than a few hundred students at best on very large campuses...
...T T HE ANTISWEATSHOP movement is a work in progress...
...It shows that it is possible to carve out small but meaningful spaces of social responsibility and to work against specific injustices in solidarity with others, elsewhere, seeking to do the same...
...A A LTHouGH I am not a labor activist, over the past eighteen months I have been actively involved in the campus antisweatshop issue...
...The movement dovetails with living wage campaigns, community-labor alliances, and other forms of resistance to unrestrained capitalist globalization that have emerged in the past few years...
...These principles challenge corporations and the sweatshops with which they subcontract as well as the growing ascendancy of market values within society and the university itself...
...And it is a good thing that USAS activists have pressed for the formation of the WRC as an alternative, for they are right to insist that corporations cannot be trusted objectively to monitor their own abuses...
...and (e) it is a good thing when students, faculty, and community members can cajole university presidents to join together to promote such socially responsible corporate activity on the part of universities...
...Michael Posner of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights has been criticized for his organization's continued affiliation with the FLA, and his insistence that the WRC and the FLA are not necessarily mutually exclusive efforts...
...Yet the establishment of the WRC has been the central goal and the central achievement of the campus antisweatshop movement to date...
...and five representatives of the NGOs...
...Furthermore, these workers live in low-wage economies that rely upon such a comparative advantage to sustain even minimal forms of capital accumulation and economic growth...
...For this reason many of these universities, in spite of their corporate identities, have chosen both to commit themselves to standards of labor decency, at least regarding their apparel contractors, and to contribute funds to the support of labor rights advocates and monitors in other parts of the world...
...This problem is most evident in the vehemently anticorporate rhetoric often voiced by USAS activists, epitomized by their denunciations of the FLA...
...It works through creative involvement of labor and human rights activists, trade unionists, students, college faculty and administrators, lawyers, accountants, and corporate officials—taken together, hardly a revolutionary bunch...
...B B UT EVEN after we have made the strategic corrections urged by sympathetic left critics, there are two further reasons to be skeptical about the global significance of the antisweatshop movement...
...In each of these instances antisweatshop activists are correct to insist that there are serious conflicts of interest in play...
Vol. 48 • September 2001 • No. 4
