From Guilt to Solidarity: Sweatshops and Political Responsibility

...However mediated the connection between my life and activities and those of the people who produce the things I buy, it is difficult to deny that there is a connection...

...we may wish to deter others from similar action in the future or to identify weak points in an institutional system that allows such blameworthy actions, in order to reform the institutions...

...Some people and institutions perform specific actions or enforce policies that can be shown as contributing to homelessness, but they do not intend to do that, and what they do only has this effect insofar as it is supplemented and mediated by other actions even further removed from that outcome...

...When we judge that structural injustice exists, we are saying that at least some of the accepted background conditions of action are morally unacceptable...

...In a blame or liability conception of responsibility, what counts as a wrong is generally conceived as a deviation from a baseline...

...Such isolation of the one liable or blameworthy person from all the others is an important aspect of legal responsibility, both in criminal and tort law...

...Working through state institutions is often an effective means to change structural processes, but states are not the only tools of effective action...

...Privilege—Where there are structural injustices, these usually produce not only victims of injustice but also privileged beneficiaries...

...Organizations and institutions, moreover, vary in their ability to influence structural processes...

...The antisweatshop movement well illustrates this challenge to normal structural background conditions...

...Power—A person's position in structural processes usually carries different degrees of potential or actual influence over the processes...

...Because the causal connection of particular individuals or even organizations to the harmful structural outcomes is often impossible to trace, there is no point in seeking to exact compensation or redress from some isolatable perpetrators...

...On the contrary...

...4. Political responsibility is shared responsibility...

...The discourse of the antisweatshop movement, as I DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 39 SWEATSHOPS hear it, draws attention to complex structural processes that do connect persons and institutions in very different social and geographic positions...

...They don't claim that these institutions and individuals, who seem so disconnected from the faraway factories, should care about their workers simply because they suffer oppression and injury...

...FOR NEARLY two years we have been living in a crisis mode, with our government suspending due process and spending our tax dollars on war and security instead of health care and environmental protection...

...A blame model of responsibility distinguishes those who are responsible from others who, by implication, are not responsible...

...Under the fault model, one assigns responsibility to particular agents whose actions can be shown to be causally connected to the circumstances of the harm...

...The harm the workers suffer comes most immediately at the hands of factory owners and managers who set hunger level wages and inhumane hours and intimidate anyone who tries to change these conditions...

...They choose not to buy certain products or brands, which they have reason to think are manufactured under unjust conditions...

...Assuming that I am right so far, the antisweatshop movement must understand responsibility differently...

...Usually we enact standard practices in a habitual way, without explicit reflection on what we are doing, having in the foreground of our consciousness and intention our immediate goals and the particular people we need to interact with to achieve them...

...Some of the large major clothing retailers, for example, such as Bennetton, The Gap, or Guess?, have built transnational systems not only of retail outlets, but also of small manufacturers with whom they contract...

...We are connected to them...

...It asks consumers, universities, and other institutions that contract with retailers, brand-name clothing companies, and many other agents, to reflect on the hitherto acceptable market relationships in which they act...

...But many structural processes do not recognize national boundaries, and they often produce more widespread and long-term harms than do particular actions or policies...

...The power and influence parameter suggests that where individuals and organizations do not have sufficient energy and resources to respond to all the structural injustices to which they are connected, they should focus on those where they have the greatest influence...

...For this reason individuals and organizations with relatively less power, but some ability to influence the powerful, must take responsibility to do that...

...Victims of injustice, however, can only succeed in their own efforts if others in a position to support them take responsibility to do so...

...we sell them in our stores...

...These activities achieved significant successes in creating better monitoring organizations, for example, and forcing corporate manufacturer's to acknowledge what goes on in factories to which they have subcontracted much of their production...

...Endemic large-scale homelessness in an otherwise affluent society, for example, is arguably an injustice without an identifiable perpetrator...

...they result from the participation of millions of people and institutions...

...But many harms, wrongs, and injustices have no isolatable perpetrator...

...Taking political responsibility in respect to social structures emphasizes the future more than the past...

...In a fault model of responsibility, blaming the victims of injustice serves to absolve others of responsibility for their plight...

...They look for other agents to blame instead, or they make excuses that mitigate their liability...

...To return to the sweatshop case, the main objective of this movement is not to compensate workers for past wrongs but to make social changes that will eliminate future harm...

...Most of us contribute to a greater or lesser degree to the production and reproduction of structural injustice precisely because we follow the accepted and expected rules and conventions of the communities in which we live...

...The students called on university administrations to take responsibility for the conditions under which clothing sold in their bookstores and worn by their athletic teams are produced, often by young women, in export processing zones in Asia and Latin America...

...I have suggested already that the injustices of inhumane labor conditions should be analyzed on these two levels...

...I suggest that we should think about action in relation to structural injustice along parameters of connection, power, and privilege...

...The universities and consumers it targets are not themselves to blame for the working conditions...

...Such practices of accusation and defense have an important place in morality and law...

...Barely three years ago, a student protest movement swept hundreds of campuses in the United States demanding that university administrations do something about sweatshops...

...Thus in the sweatshop case, the specific position of the workers carries with it specific responsibilities...

...The most common model of assigning responsibility derives from legal reasoning about guilt or fault for a harm inflicted...

...The movement challenges the widely held idea that people and institutions should be held more responsible for what takes place inside their own country than for what takes place outside, that our responsibilities are necessarily greater for close-by effects of our actions than for those that are diffuse and remote...

...Recognizing the power of connection in establishing responsibility, some people decide that the way to exercise this responsibility is to disconnect...

...it has to be taken up...

...When people feel that they are being blamed, they tend to react defensively...

...If candidates for responsibility can demonstrate that their causal relation to the harm was not voluntary, that they were coerced or that they were in some other way not free, then their responsibility is usually mitigated if not 40 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 dissolved...

...Since the heyday of the campus antisweatshop activity several important books have appeared...

...And it is nearly impossible in the contemporary world for a person to remove herself from any implication in structures that produce injustice...

...Assigning responsibility to some agents, on this model, also has the function of absolving other agents...

...Blame and praise are primarily backward looking judgments...

...In Behind the Label, Edna Bonacich and Richard Appelbaum describe the structural underpinnings of sweatshops in Los Angeles and show their connection to others in Asia...

...I pointed out earlier that one difference between a liability model and a political model of responsibility is that those who suffer injustice share political responsibility...

...Political responsibility doesn't reckon debts, but aims at results, and thus depends on the actions of everyone who is in a position to contribute to those results...

...Such demands challenge the assumption that market exchange processes are or ought to be untraceable, and so they have had some effect in improving tracking systems and accountability...

...If we understand that structural processes cause (some) injustices, then those of DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 4 SWEATSHOPS us who participate in the production and reproduction of the structures should recognize that our actions contribute to the injustice...

...Connection—The concept of political responsibility holds that agents have forward looking responsibilities to take action to remedy structural injustices—not just because all right thinking people should be concerned about suffering wherever it occurs, but on the more specific grounds that we are connected SWEATSHOPS by our own actions to the structural processes that produce injustice...

...2. Political responsibility questions "normal" conditions...

...The basis of political responsibility lies not in membership in a political community governed by a common set of laws and regulatory institutions, but rather in social and economic connection...

...They refer to an action or event assumed to have reached its end...

...The connected actions must be voluntary...

...For other cases of injustice some specific perpetrators can be identified and blamed as immediate causes, but these too are enabled and supported by wider social structures in which millions of people participate...

...Persons who benefit from structural inequalities have a special moral responsibility to join in correcting them—not because they are to blame, but because they are able to adapt to changed circumstances without suffering serious deprivation...

...The purpose of assigning responsibility as fault or liability is usually to sanction, punish, or exact compensation...

...Because of the size, reach, and relative influence of such organizations, it makes sense to expect major decision makers in them to take respon sibility for working conditions in factories they neither own nor directly operate...

...Their conditions are likely to improve only if they organize to demand and monitor the improvements...

...Public debate about sweatshops overseas led to the discovery of sweatshops closer to home—in major American cities...

...Powerful institutions, of course, often have more interest in perpetuating the status quo than in changing established structures and the outcomes they produce...

...Most of us have not committed individual wrongs...

...In the conception of political responsibility, then, finding that some people bear responsibility for injustice does not necessarily absolve others...

...Other labor and social justice activists leafleted at major retailers, educating consumers and criticizing executive indifference...

...Such a project cannot be undertaken, of course, without reflection on the past: we need to understand the history of processes that produce specific outcomes, and in this sense must be backward looking...

...Implicitly, we assume a normal background situation that is morally acceptable, if not ideal...

...The antisweatshop movement has been a consumer and citizens movement as well as a movement of the most affected workers and the labor organizations supporting them...

...clothing industry as it has been globalized in her book, Making Sweatshops...

...Many stalwart activists continue to organize their fellow students and their fellow union or church members, to support union organizing among the most exploited and to mount court action to hold companies liable for labor rights violations...

...Organized boycotts, on the other hand, can be one effective means of exercising political responsibility...

...The antisweatshop movement has begun to create information-sharing and monitoring institutions whose purpose is to connect workers in specific locales to solidarity organizations far away who try to hold manufacturers to account for working conditions...

...Because they argue that organizations or collectives, as well as individual persons, can be blamed for harms, most accounts of collective responsibility also aim to distinguish those who have done the SWEATSHOPS harm from those who have not...

...Liability vs...

...They are connected to those conditions only indirectly and in a highly mediated fashion through market relations and other complex structural processes...

...She occasionally stands with others handing out flyers in front of the Disney Store on Michigan Avenue...

...One means of deciding which responsibilities are mine, then, is by understanding particular connections between my actions and distant others...

...Our responsibility is political in the sense that acting on it involves joining in a public discourse where we try to persuade one another about courses of collective action that will contribute to social change...

...rather, we participate by our normal and on the face of it innocuous actions in processes that produce wrongs...

...Where it can be argued that a group shares responsibility for structural processes that produce injustice, but institutions for regulating those processes don't exist, we ought to try to create new institutions...

...Consumer movements are often significant in this respect because, as I've said, they demystify processes of production and distribution...

...Students on hunger strikes protested university administrations as well as corporate leaders...

...An important corollary of this feature of political responsibility is that many of those properly thought to be victims of harm or injustice may nevertheless have political responsibilities in relation to it...

...The ongoing sense of emergency diverts political discussion and problem solving resources from the more banal harms that were on the public radar screen before we switched into crisis mode and that continue to fester— the lack of affordable housing, violence against women, declining water supplies, or the awful labor conditions in which many workers around the world sweat to produce clothes, shoes, toys, and other everyday goods...

...In the case of labor exploitation, the workers themselves ought to resist if they can...

...Laws and regulatory institutions are less a basis for political responsibility than a means of discharging it...

...And then we should take responsibility for changing the processes...

...One of the things particularly interesting about this movement is that it raises transnational and global DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 43 SWEATSHOPS questions about who should act for change...

...While there have been some reforms, the basic problem of horrendous labor conditions in a globalized clothing industry, as well as in other industries, remains...

...It challenges all the agents that are part of the economic chain between the workers who make garments and the people who buy and wear them to ask whether "business as usual" is morally acceptable...

...While different in these respects, responsibility as fault and strict liability share two other features important for distinguishing them from political responsibility...

...Discharging my responsibility in this situation means joining in collective actions with others...

...It doesn't follow from this point—that privilege generates special responsibilities—that victims of injustice do not share responsibility to try to change the conditions that constrain their options...

...But when such a boycott is the act of a single individual, it has no effect on those conditions...

...My main purpose in this essay is to outline the elements of this argument and contrast it with the more familiar concept of responsibility as blame or liability...

...This agent can be a collective entity, such as a corporation, treated as single agent for the purposes of assigning responsibility...

...it reviews the history of events in order to assign responsibility, usually for the sake of exacting punishment or compensation...

...Political Responsibility I think that this claim of responsibility, implicit in the antisweatshop movement, as well as some other contemporary labor and environmental movements, is rather novel...

...A crime or an actionable harm consists in a morally and legally unacceptable deviation from this background structure...

...Implications of the Idea The claims of the antisweatshop movement, I have suggested, are best understood under a model of political responsibility...

...The fault or liability model is primarily backward looking...

...44 • DISSENT / Spring 2003...

...It involves an argument that agents are responsible for injustice by virtue of their structural connection to it, even though they are not to blame for it...

...Once we take this step, however, we may begin to move toward a conception of political responsibility...

...The process that brought about the harm is conceived as a discrete, bounded event that breaks away from the normal flow of events...

...A further step in thinking about political responsibility, then, involves distinguishing kinds and degrees...

...Such backward looking condemnation may partly have a forward looking purpose...

...The antisweatshop movement recognizes this criterion by targeting corporate or regulatory bodies that arguably have the power to change structural processes...

...So stated, however, this idea of responsibility may sound both overwhelming and unfair—overwhelming because most of us participate in many such processes, and unfair because some people would seem to be in a position to influence them more than others...

...If corporate executives or ordinary people buying shoes believe that antisweatshop activists are blaming them for the conditions under which the shoes are produced, they rightly become indignant, or scoff at what they perceive as the extremism of the movement...

...Ellen Israel Rosen provides a history of the political economy of the U.S...

...A concept of political responsibility in relation to structural injustices, on the other hand, doesn't focus on harms that deviate from the normal and acceptable, but rather brings into question the "normal" background conditions...

...When the issue is how to mobilize collectives for the sake of social change, however, such rhetorics of blame and finger-pointing lead more to resentment and refusal to take responsibility than to useful action...

...To find this person or group guilty of a crime usually implies that others accused of the same crime are not guilty...

...Degrees and Kind of Responsibility In principle, all who participate by their actions in the structural processes that produce unjust outcomes share responsibility for working to alter those processes...

...The antisweatshop movement has had some success in reducing the anonymity of market processes by demanding that universities and other bulk consumers, as well as large retailers, identify the sites where particular items are manufactured...

...The antisweatshop movement argues that all the persons and institutions who participate in the structural processes that produce this constraint should take responsibility for the condition of the workers...

...These owners and managers themselves operate, however, in a huge global system that both encourages their practices and constrains their ability to modify those practices—because of a realistic fear of being undercut in a highly competitive environment...

...Leaflets distributed on the street not only criticize big corporate retailers, but also exhort consumers entering stores to pay attention to the conditions of workers in factories far away producing the products they buy, and to join the movement to put pressure on the powerful institutions that can put pressure on the factory owners...

...For many people may be bound to undertake those reforms, even though they are not to blame for past problems...

...There are four features of the idea of political responsibility that distinguish it from blame or liability 1. Political responsibility does not mark out and isolate those who are considered to be responsible...

...we wear clothes they make...

...Punishment, redress, or compensation aims to restore normality or to "make whole" in relation to the baseline condition...

...A concept of strict liability departs from this model in that it holds individuals liable for an action even if they did not intend the outcome, or holds them liable for a harm caused by someone under their command...

...IRIS YOUNG teaches political philosophy at the University of Chicago...

...If the injustice is a result of structural processes involving many individuals and institutions engaging in normal and accepted activities, the necessary change requires the cooperation of many of those individuals and institutions...

...When the agents are causally and freely responsible, however, it is appropriate to blame them for the harmful circumstances...

...Conceptualizing political responsibility as 42 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 distinct from blame is important for motivating political action...

...To the extent that this implication is a ground of political responsibility, then, the responsibility cannot be escaped by withdrawal...

...3. Political responsibility looks forward rather than backward...

...Distinguishing political responsibility from blame or liability allows us to urge one another to take responsibility together for the fact that our actions collectively contribute to the complex structural processes that produce the working conditions we deplore...

...Although many people would like to say that such a mediated connection implies that they are not responsible at all, the movement argues that institutions, individual consumers, and faraway decision makers in the clothing industry, are responsible in a different sense, which I want to call political responsibility...

...So the movement has done much to de-fetishize commodities, revealing market structures as complex human creations...

...What interests me about the claims these activists make on universities, city governments, and individual consumers is that they are not simply moralistic...

...In a conception of political responsibility, however, those who can properly be called victims of structural injustice often share the responsibility to try to change the structures...

...We share responsibility for organizing changes in how the processes work...