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THE QUANDARIES OF CONSUMER-BASED LABOR ACTIVISM Andrew Ross
To cite this Article Ross, Andrew(2008) 'THE QUANDARIES OF CONSUMER-BASED LABOR ACTIVISM', Cultural Studies, 22: 5, 770 — 787 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09502380802246017 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380802246017
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Andrew Ross
THE QUANDARIES OF CONSUMER-BASED
LABOR ACTIVISM
A low-wage case study
This essay takes anti-sweatshop activism as a case-study of a labor movement that engages consumer politics with mixed results. It reviews the success of the media- honed strategies deployed to raise public concern about substandard workplace conditions in the global garment industry, and summarizes corporate efforts to redeem their tarnished image through the public relations vehicle of ‘corporate social responsibility’. The record of attention to labor abuses with the history of the consumer movement confirms the existence of a longstanding dialogue between advocacy organizations oriented to the politics of production and consumption respectively. But there is also a history of missed opportunities on the labor side to question the dominant materialist lifestyle of a consumer civilization. This shortcoming is highlighted by the rise of the anti-consumer movement, which evangelizes sweeping changes in lifestyle, trading, and modes of livelihood, and sees ethical consumption as little more than a way to greenwash the status quo. The essay argues that anti-sweatshop activists (who give short shrift to foundational challenges to the prevailing system) and anti-consumerists (often insensitive to the livelihoods that are tied to servicing the goods economy) would each benefit from integrating more of the others’ philosophies and goals. Concerns about the unsustainability of a consumer civilization can and should be addressed at the point of production. On the other side, anti-consumerists ought to consider production workers and labor-based organizations as likely allies rather than as hapless victims of false consciousness.
Keywords sweatshops; labor movement; consumer boycotts; brand- busting; union organizing; anti-consumerism
Introduction
How long does any social movement have to make its mark on public consciousness? Given the ballooning pace of competition on today’s information landscape, the window of opportunity is probably down to about
Cultural Studies Vol. 22, No. 5 September 2008, pp. 770�787 ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online – 2008 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502380802246017
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seven years. If a movement is to achieve the status of an unavoidable moral cause, then it has to clearly register its message within that time-frame through some innovation for capturing media attention. So, too, the targets of the movement are under similar pressure to publicize effectively the self-directed remedies for their sins. Their task, in other words, is to leave the public with the impression that the problem for which they are being held accountable has been solved.
For the sake of argument, let us accept this curt description as a template for the conduct of modern, media-oriented activism. Among recent candidates, the anti-sweatshop movement appears to fit the bill quite well.
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Emerging in North America and Europe in the mid-1990s, it raised to a fine art the tactics of shaming global consumer brand firms through exposés of the substandard workplaces of their suppliers, and it succeeded in building a fully international network of well-connected activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). By 2003, its goals were more or less normalized in the public mind; the moral shock value of its tactics could no longer command headlines with quite the same dramatic ease. For consumers, the ‘global sweatshop’ was now a real, albeit distant, concept to live with, and some measure of guilt at the ‘labor behind the label’ had become a factor in the psychology of consumption. But multinational corporations sullied by ties to labor abuses had also waged a capable public relations (PR) campaign in response. Pressured by activists to reveal factory locations and adopt workplace codes of conduct for their suppliers, they worked hard at spinning these limited policy changes into a cloak of respectability for their brands. In a series of PR moves that are now paradigmatic for the burgeoning ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) movement, firms like Nike, the Gap, and Reebok strove to redeem their tarnished images, emerging from the fray as born-again paragons of social justice. For many informed consumers attentive to the PR, the truism that some of their favorite brands had taken steps to eradicate sweatshops would prove an adequate salve for their consciences. In their minds, labor atrocities might still exist, but buying Nike wares, rather than boycotting them, was somehow now helping to address the problem.
This, at least, is one of the more deflationary narratives that has been circulating around the anti-sweatshop movement. It has some traction among weary activists, and understandably so, since they have been up against some of the most powerful, and wily, corporations in the world. It is also echoed by armchair leftists, who specialize, on demand, in the business of explicating our traditions of despair. For reasons that will be explored here, it is not a narrative that I fully accept. The impact of anti-sweatshop campaigns on the labor movement itself (not to mention the much broader, global justice movement) has yet to be fully assessed. These campaigns not only helped turn a whole generation of young people toward labor politics for the first time since the 1930s; they were also pioneering efforts in the field of transnational
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labor organizing. So, too, the capacity of global corporations to prevail over markets and public opinion alike can no longer rely, as it once did, on the oxygen of free trade. The neo-liberal game is clearly not yet up, but its rules of play have been widely discredited � not least by the public hullabaloo about sweatshops � and nascent alternatives are beginning to form all over Latin America.
On the face of it, this foregoing narrative about the losses and gains of the anti-sweatshop movement was a rather predictable result of pursuing movement goals aimed at securing labor rights for workers in the global South through political tactics that appealed primarily to the conscience of consumers in the North. The fragile connection between such unequal communities is not easy to maintain beyond the duration of a few news cycles. So, too the experiential legacies that framed the campaigns were a heavy burden to bear. On the one hand, there was the experience, widely shared within the labor movement, of being consistently outmaneuvered by runaway employers. On the other hand, there was the equally gloomy experience, on the part of consumer activists, of seeing tactics being co-opted by corporate PR adepts. Purists, on the left or in the more ascetic anti-consumerist circles, could well conclude that, under existing conditions of capitalism, any effort to push for ‘fair labor’ standards is hopelessly reformist and doomed to end in frustration.
But even if this judgement were valid, the lessons of contemporary anti- sweatshop activism would not stop there. The history of the movement continues to raise crucial questions about the current and future shape of global organizing in the face of obstacles that appear to be insurmountable. And for those bent on integrating labor concerns more into the sphere of cultural politics, the case-study of the anti- and pro- corporate maneuvers around contemporary anti-sweatshop campaigning is one that cannot be comfortably ignored. In this essay, I will review some of the strengths generated by the movement, along with the opportunities missed. In comparing the tactics and goals of sweatshop activism with those adopted by the anti-consumer movement, I also hope to yield some useful lessons.
The campaign pitch
If the goals of anti-sweatshop campaigning were to lay the groundwork for the eradication of the global sweatshop, then this could just as well have been achieved through morally persuasive appeals to legislators and regulators, or through mass worker organization in key locations. It was not dependent on reforming patterns of consumption significantly, or even on raising consumer consciousness to some critical plateau. However, the leverage afforded by the vulnerability of brand names to bad publicity proved irresistible. The topmost
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profits in the apparel industry hinge on the repute of the label being sustained through each cycle of seasonal turnover. Nothing exposed corporate greed more than highlighting the gulf between the meager wages paid to production workers, toiling under life-threatening conditions, and the lavish profits enjoyed by retailers and brand firms on the basis of label recognition and consumer loyalty. The general consumer was the natural audience to reach with such exposeés, and this brought into play some of the tactics of, and debates about, the mobilization of consumer power that are familiar to veterans of consumer politics.
This was hardly the first time that labor-based campaigns had strayed into the realm of consumer politics (Ross 2001). The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) pioneered the labor movement’s ‘Look for the Union Label’ pitch to working class and progressive consumers in the 1960s and the 1970s, and to this day it remains a cornerstone of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization’s (AFL-CIO’s) public education policy (Tyler 1995). Buy-American populist campaigns have a much longer history, and while trade unions have generally supported them out of expediency, they were often fomented by anti-union crusaders like William Randolph Hearst. Dana Frank, the historian of these campaigns, has analyzed the virulent racism that accompanied their expressions of economic nationalism (Frank 1999). For the unions that supported them, the overt goal of protecting jobs was often inseparable from implicit anti-foreigner sentiment (namely the Japan-bashing of the 1980s or the more recent galvanizing against the ‘China threat’).
On the side of targeted exclusion, labor advocates have turned specific boycotts of consumer products to their advantage. Most famously, the spectacular success of the California table grapes boycott (1965�1970) was key to winning contracts for the United Farm Workers. In recent years, a national consumer boycott of Mount Olive Pickle products helped guest workers in North Carolina win union representation and a contract. A similar boycott of Taco Bell helped the Coalition of Immolakee Workers win improvement in wages and conditions for Central Florida farm workers. So, too, the boycott- based ‘Killer Coke’ campaign (organized in protest against the corporation’s complicity in brutally suppressing union organizing in Colombia) is directing a whole new generation of scrutiny against the labor economy of Coca- Colonization. Nor has the consumer movement itself been inattentive to labor conditions. Indeed, the origins of the National Consumer League (formed in 1899) lay in the call for consumers to leverage their buying power to raise the starvation wages of the ‘girls behind the counter’ in retail stores (Storrs 2000). Florence Kelley, the league’s first executive secretary, led the organization full tilt into the first anti-sweatshop movement in the early 1900s, and, throughout the twentieth century, the League remained consistently attentive to working conditions, lobbying hard for passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938,
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helping to create the Child Labor Coalition in the 1980s, and participating in the Fair Labor Association from the late 1990s onward.
In the 1920s and 1930s, consumer advocates such as Stuart Chase, Frederick Schlink, Arthur Kallet, and Colston Warne focused primarily on food safety and fraud, but concerns about fair labor were not sidelined (Chase & Schlink 1927, Kallet & Schlink 1933). The company exposeés undertaken by Ralph Nader in the late 1960s, and the subsequent investigative reports issued by Nader’s Raiders in the early 1970s uncovered a structural pattern of corporate abuse and corruption, aided and abetted by government collusion, that placed workplace exploitation clearly within the chain of non-account- ability that endangered consumers. The citizens’ action groups, founded by Nader, that demanded corporate and governmental responsibility, were prototypes of the kind of civil society activism that has flourished in recent years, especially in the alternative globalization movement.
The progressive thrust of Naderism, with its systematic critiques of power, can be distinguished from the mainstream of the consumer movement which tends to see its mission as rationalizing consumer choice (i.e. consumers ought to have the information they need to make safe choices, and producers ought to respond with ethical practices). But what about the more radical strain of thought and action which describes itself as anti-consumerist? It challenges the existing patterns of consumption as fundamentally destructive, and evangelizes sweeping changes in lifestyle, trading, and modes of livelihood (De Graff et al. 2001). The anti-consumerist sees ethical consumption as little more than a way to greenwash the status quo. Its devotees flatly reject a politics that grounds civil rights in the purchasing power of consumers.
When it comes to labor issues, the anti-consumerist injunction to consume less is often accompanied by the appeal to work less. Why indeed should we work such long hours to win possession of so many consumer goods? As it happens, this impulse speaks to a longstanding debate within the labor movement about the moral virtues of hard work. The great crusades in the nineteenth century for the eight-hour day, and in the twentieth century for a 40-hour week with paid vacations, co-existed uneasily with the labor movement’s own version of the Puritan work ethic based on the dignity of labor and the right to work. In any event, the push for reduced hours, based on the right to leisure, ran out of steam in the capital-labor truce of the post-war years with a contractual understanding about how increases in productivity would be tied to incremental wage increases for primary sector workers in manufacturing. In the US, reductions in the workweek would only be seriously considered during periods of recession and high unemployment as a way of sharing work around. While the working week was reduced to 35 hours in 2000 in France (home of a vigorous anti-work tradition in the vein of Paul Lafargue’s The Right to be Lazy) pressure to expand it through ‘flexible’ work arrangements has been the norm in most other advanced economies (Lafargue,
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1883/1989). Income polarization has left the vast majority of working people, stranded by real wage stagnation, with little choice but to work longer, and often in more than one job. The capacity to ‘downshift’ from a fast-track corporate career has been a preserve of the relatively affluent, in much the same way as the anti-consumerist’s commitment to ‘voluntary simplicity’ is widely viewed as an option for secure middle-class people who can afford the status loss that results from eschewing materialism (Schor 1998).
Beyond the nation
How did anti-sweatshop campaigning enter the field of consumer politics? In each of the areas described earlier � buying to protect domestic jobs, mounting boycott coalitions, and organizing for sustainability around an anti-work/pro- leisure platform � the circumstances of entry were altered significantly by the accelerated rate of economic globalization that began with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and went into overdrive with China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. Indeed, it was implicit in the spirit of anti-sweatshop activism that the field of engagement had to be expanded to embrace the challenge of global organizing.
In this respect, it was clear, from the beginning, that protectionist appeals to the national interest, or to the livelihoods of domestic workers, were no longer as relevant or useful as they had been in earlier decades. Goods that are wholly produced in one country are few and far between, and a ‘Made in the USA’ label might only refer to one small part of the production process. Almost all of the brands targeted by activists were produced offshore, or else moved offshore (like Guess) when their domestic production facilities and wages were targeted by sweatshop activists. Most realists in the apparel industry acknowledged that the out-migration of labor-intensive US jobs (beginning as early as the 1960s) was virtually impossible to stem. By the mid- 1990s, the garment union, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), was looking to other sectors to organize, and eventually merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) in 2004, to facilitate this diversification.
That is not to say that economic nationalism did not prove expedient in politically-minded appeals to consumers. The National Labor Committee (NLC) (linchpin of the movement) made its name in the 1992 report Paying to Lose Our Jobs by exposing the promotional activities and the economic support offered by US government agencies, under the USAID program, to induce American corporations into moving production to maquilas (NLC 1992, Krupat 1997). The theme of American jobloss continued to be an effective point of reference, especially when offshore outsourcing began to take its toll
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on more skilled, high-value livelihoods. Protectionism also played well in tabloid reporting and was a perennial favorite among grandstanding politicians. So, too, legislative measures aimed at stemming jobloss were welcomed by small businesses, unable to move offshore and operate on a global scale like the multinationals who controlled the free trade policy agenda of the National Association of Manufacturers.
Indeed, the most successful of the American garment companies that sprang up to trade on ‘sweat-free’ reputations was named American Apparel, ostensibly to reinforce its claim that all company products were made domestically, in factories located in downtown Los Angeles. While its owner aggressively resisted a union organizing drive, the firm profited, in its advertising strategies, from the fact that it paid fair wages to its production workers (well above the city’s own living wage). Even more significant, however, its success in the youth retail market derived from its savvy design and edgy style quotient. Ethical producers who were its US competitors � TeamX (which produced the SweatX brand) or Bienestar International [which still produces No Sweat (http://www.nosweat.net)] � marketed to progres- sive individuals and institutions, such as unions or colleges. By contrast, American Apparel tested itself and its wares on the open market, to prove it could compete on style, while also being sweat-free, rather than prove it could compete because it was sweat-free. The distinction has not been readily acknowledged within the anti-sweatshop movement, where opinions about the company have been fatally colored by the owner’s antipathy to unions, or by the perception that its sweat-free reputation has been exploited for commercial ends rather than celebrated for its own sake (Dreier & Appelbaum 2004). Along the same lines, while the firm’s success has demonstrated that it is possible to compete with global offshore producers by paying fair wages to domestic workers, the appeal of the brand name, American Apparel, arguably lies less in its invitation to patriotic consumption than to the perceived hipness of its prosaic, neo-generic character, distinguishing it from the flash monikers chosen for other commercial brands. By contrast, most other firms in the ethical clothing business tend to call attention to political consciousness in their brand names � Made in Dignity (Belgium, France, Italy), Ethical Threads (UK), Dignity Return (Bangkok), Oko-Fair (Germany), and People Tree (UK and Japan).
Notwithstanding the common-sense appeal of protectionism � every community surely has the right to protect the livelihoods of its members � the fundamental lesson preached by the (second) anti-sweatshop movement lay in the global dimensions of the struggle against worker exploitation. Just as the first movement, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, sought to establish national standards, the second wave clearly saw its goal was to set standards for the global economy (Bender & Greenwald 2004, Bonacich & Appelbaum 2000). This meant accepting that the rights of workers in Lesotho,
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Guatemala, or Guangdong were on a par with those in the global North whose jobs may have been transferred offshore. The only alternative to a free trade order built on what economists euphemistically call ‘global labor arbitrage’ was to build networks that are equally global in scope, based on the principles of fair trade, sustainable economics, internationally-recognized labor and human rights, and socially conscious investment, rather than on short-term profit and plunder. For trade unionists reared on the a priori injunction to protect their own members, global reach has been a hard lesson to swallow, especially because the challenge is so daunting. Trade liberalization in India and China in the last decade has effectively doubled the global workforce that is available to capitalist investors � a clear recipe for maximum exploitation in labor-intensive sectors. The task of establishing enforceable global labor standards under these circumstances is formidable. Nor has it been easy to persuade union members of the benefit of global organizing when the prospect of harvesting short-term results was minimal. There existed a long prior record of international solidarity campaigns against companies operating in different countries, but they were mostly in unionized core sectors of advanced economies; dockworkers or auto workers, for example, taking sympathy actions on each others’ behalf, often through the agency of the international trade secretariats formed to coordinate unions in the large industrial sectors, or through United Nations (UN) agencies like the International Labor Organization. In addition, and especially in the American labor movement, the push for unions to go global was often underwritten by institutional complicity with the expansionist interest of state capitalism (Herod 1997). When capital and labor were partners during the Pax Americana, it was implicitly acknowledged that whatever was good for American business abroad was good for the domestic workers who enjoyed the world’s highest standard of living. Accordingly, the notorious anti-communist activities of the AFL- CIO’s regional labor organizations (especially the American Institute for Free Labor Development, directed at suppressing radical labor movements in Latin America) were prime examples of labor in the service of Cold War imperialism (Radosh 1969). The legacy of that period of US labor internationalism has not been easy to shake off, and has bedeviled the efforts of independent labor advocates to build relations of trust in developing countries.
Nonetheless, anti-sweatshop campaigning broke new ground by demon- strating that attention to, and links with, unorganized workers in these developing countries � the most marginalized and vulnerable workers of all � might be an effective way to pressure high-profile firms to take responsibility for the whole chain of dispersed production that goes into the making of their goods (Bullert 2000, Ross 2004). What had hitherto been perceived as a firm’s strength � the ability to produce in locations that lay beyond the orbit of
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regulatory scrutiny � could be turned into a major liability when consumer brand imagery was threatened by association with sweatshops.
The movement’s iconic moment came when an especially vulnerable celebrity figure, Kathie Lee Gifford, fell into the trap, and was exposed by the NLC in 1996 for her Wal-Mart clothing line’s reliance on sweatshop suppliers in Honduras. The Gifford campaign established a formula that could be replicated as long as celebrity cultural capital was used to sell the brand. To cite a more recent example, from 2004, the NLC, in conjunction with sweatshop activists at New York University (NYU), was still able to work the formula with ease to pressure the Olsen Twins, enrolled in the university at the time, into supporting maternity leave for Bangladeshi workers producing for their Wal-Mart clothing line. Given its potency, the need to avoid an NLC- style exposé has been widely acknowledged and absorbed in the corporate world. In the course of field interviews I did in East China in 2003, managers and executives of multinational firms regularly referred to ‘the Kathie Lee Gifford affair’ as shorthand for their worst fears (Ross 2006).
The opportunities for exposure multiplied in the case of parent companies with several brands, where PR damage to one brand can affect the entire group. In 2002, for example, the major trade union federations of France, the Netherlands, and the US joined together to target Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR), the French multinational apparel company known for major brands like Gucci, Brylane, FNAC, Yves Saint-Laurent, and Ellos. The union campaign linked substandard conditions in PPR supplier factories in India and the Philippines to union-busting at a Brylane distribution center in Indianapolis. As the most vulnerable link in the publicity chain, it was the Gucci name that offered the most traction, and so activists focused on sullying the luxury goods brand. As a result of the international pressure, the Indianapolis workers won the right to union representation in February 2003, but the firm was able to cut and run from the Asian suppliers whose employee abuse had been publicized. The offshore workers simply lost their jobs. In a similar case, an international union campaign targeted H&M, the Swedish-based global fashion company, for its anti-union policies in US outlets. Once again, the poor record of the firm’s Asian suppliers was used to shame the company and win union rights for workers in North America. As for the workers in the offshore supply chain, the company’s PR wing had other plans for them. In common with other apparel giants, H&M took steps to beef up its ethical production and trading profile. Its 2004 CSR report announced an ominous shift from ‘policing the supply chain to working with it’ � tell-tale rhetoric for policies designed to pressure suppliers to fake compliance with corporate codes of conduct.
A successful alternative strategy to the Kathie Lee Gifford formula was to center a campaign around an institution associated with high ethical standing. The movement among American college students to put pressure on licensees of varsity names exploited the need for universities to uphold the integrity of
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their name, even when it appeared as a logo brand on clothing. The efforts of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) to create a sweat-free zone for college licensing contracts turned a small but significant sector of the garment industry into a closely-contested war of position between sportswear giants like Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, regulatory NGOs, and the labor movement (Featherstone 2002). The Workers Rights Consortium, which emerged as the monitoring institution of choice for USAS, helped to win some concrete victories for workers in free trade zones in Central America and south-east Asia by leveraging the collective clout of its members � more than 150 institutional licensors (Esbenshade 2004).
In Europe, the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) selected international sporting institutions like the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as the bodies of ethical integrity to organize around. Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Fila, Lotto, Umbro, and Puma are all top sponsors or suppliers of quadrennial mega-events like the Euro football championship, the World Cup, and the Olympic Games. Building on a landmark 1996 Code of Labor Practice for all products with a FIFA logo, CCC launched a Play Fair campaign to pressure sponsors to live up to this code of compliance and others. The campaign drew the support of top athletes and hundreds of organizations in over 35 countries in advance of the 2004 Olympics, and a broad initiative (looking forward to the Beijing games in 2008) for the IOC sportswear industry was planned at Athens by the CCC and Oxfam, with the cooperation of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation (http://www.cleanclothes.org).
Frequently asked questions
In the public sector, therefore, the movement to pass ordinances mandating sweat-free criteria for city and government contractors has been widely successful. But what about the open markets, where the only ethical court of appeal is the individual consumer’s conscience? With nationalist purchasing an increasingly irrelevant, or unattractive, option for consumers, the opportu- nities to promote ‘positive buying’ have been limited to the handful of small firms (previously mentioned) that sprang up from fair trade activist circles to offer an ethical alternative to the industry leaders. No global apparel company has earned the right to be considered sweat-free, clothing labels convey little useful or accurate information, and consumers looking to do their own research are likely to run into a tide of PR about the CSR practices of any choice brand. The more determined, or sophisticated, researcher would have to sift through the claims, records, and case studies of companies that participate in multi-stakeholder initiatives like the Ethical Trade Initiative in
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the UK, the Fair Wear Foundation in the Netherlands, or the Fair Labor Association in the US. (Terms of participation involve commitment to supplier codes of conduct and a willingness to be investigated if the workers of a supplier report violations of the code.) The results of such research would be murky, to say the least.
The absence of a list of ‘clean’ brands to recommend to consumers is unfortunate, because it limits any follow-up to the urgent appeals that activists make to the public consumer. Since individuals of conscience tend to want to use their consuming power in a tangible way, the appeal of ‘negative purchasing’ then becomes a powerful one. For many people, wearing a swoosh has come to be as abhorrent as wearing a fur coat. The more acute their animus against the brand the more seductive the prospect of hurting it financially through reduced sales. Yet it has not been considered useful to encourage the boycott of specific apparel brands. Unlike in the case of commerce which involves animal abuse (such as the fur trade), where boycotts have been very effective, the same strategy can be harmful in cases that involve worker abuse. More often than not, the company will seek to clear its name by cutting contracts with the offending supplier and the workers will be laid off. Workers’ rights and livelihoods are better served by public pressure on the brand to rectify the abuses by improving workers’ pay and conditions. Ultimately, a boycott that succeeds in significantly reducing consumption can lead to an increase in price pressure on the entire production chain by the brand firm, which only worsens worker conditions.
Without follow-through directed at the conditions of specific workers, high-visibility exposés, by their nature, all too often result in the company cutting and running. It is by far the easiest way to dissociate the brand from any problem, especially when there is no shortage of suppliers. If corporate PR handles things right, the brand can actually be enhanced by the appearance of having reacted quickly by punishing an ‘abusive’ supplier through the termination of its contract. In reality, the abuses invariably stem from the pressure put on small contractors by a brand or retailer to deliver faster and cheaper; prices paid to factories for production have decreased in most global locations over the last several years. The favored scenario of the humanitarian corporate executive from the North teaching a lesson about worker respect to the callous contractor from the South is entirely illusory, not to mention racist.
Northern activists also faced critiques from the global South when they failed to follow through with production workers whose abuse had featured in their campaign (Kabeer 2000). Offshore workers, in quasi-militarized free trade zones, put themselves at great risk when they speak out about abuses, and there is little insurance to be found in the vague footprint of attention that is left by a media splash in the global North. A politics based on the volunteer conscience of affluent consumers is a thin guarantee of justice for workers at the mercy of footloose foreign investors and the hardscrabble local contractors
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whose ability to remain competitive rests on squeezing more out of their workforce. This kind of campaign, featuring offshore sweatshop workers, not only reproduced the industrial division of production from consumption sites, but also reprised a paternalist history (from Abolitionism onwards) of using representations of poor people in the South to manipulate the scruples of Northern liberals (Brooks 2003). Immigrant women employed in domestic US sweatshops eschewed the media image campaigns in favor of organizing their own workers centers, usually independent of the trade union movement (Louie & Yoon 2001). So, too student activists shifted their own strategies in response to the criticisms.
The most obvious alternative was for activists to devote themselves to helping offshore workers build unions. Students involved early in USAS chapters had focused their energies on pressuring corporations to establish factory codes of conduct, and then on forming an independent network of local monitors (as opposed to the multinational auditing firms that corpora- tions preferred) to check enforcement of the codes. However, it became clear that the codes were virtually impossible to enforce; manufacturers asked their suppliers to ‘fake’ compliance, which CSR representatives spun into positive publicity. The only practical way of stopping the spin was to convert the anti- sweatshop movement into a union-building program in free trade supplier zones. Using the monitoring capability of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) to combat union-busting in the factories of licensees, workers were able to get independent union contracts signed in strategic locations: at KukDong, a Mexican factory producing for Nike and Reebok, and at BJ & B, a collegiate cap-making factory in the Dominican Republic that supplies major brands. Conditions for union organization at several other factories were nurtured. But these initial gains have been difficult to sustain against investor flight in the labor-intensive apparel sector, where transnational bidding auctions ensure that orders will go to the cheapest (and most illegal) suppliers. Even when the WRC has succeeded in soliciting cooperation from big brand members of the rival Fair Labor Association, getting results on the ground has been tough going. Contractors prefer to shift their investment elsewhere than work with an independent union or listen to lessons about ethical practices from CSR representatives whose sourcing managers are, at the same time, demanding delivery prices and schedules quite at odds with the humanitarian messages. A more recent WRC/USAS policy to demand that licensees only contract from a list of designated suppliers (who host unions and/or pay living wages) in the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Mexico, Thailand, South Africa, and Indonesia, is an ambitious effort to close the loopholes and create the prototype for a durable sweat-free sector.
When factories that have hosted model unionizing efforts are closed down, activists’ hard-earned morale plummets, and there is little recourse to media- oriented campaigns when the managers of the brand name can claim that they
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intervened on behalf of the workers. Those laid-off are especially embittered, and other workers in the same labor market are less emboldened to undertake an organizing effort. Even if the latter are strong-willed, they are unlikely to risk losing their livelihoods unless they can rely on the support of a more powerful institution � either the state or a larger union movement. Whether this will change as a result of the shift in power leftward in regions like Latin America remains to be seen. As for the larger union movement, it continues to face, on a global scale, exactly the same technical problem as the first anti- sweatshop movement at the turn of the twentieth century � a contracting system that is an effective, and resilient, capitalist tool for dividing labor and dispersing labor power.
Recognition of the intractability of this problem has resulted, primarily, in a diversification of activist energies. Attention to living wage campaigns, on campuses, or in cities and metropolitan regions, has afforded activists more local control over events, while responding to criticisms, for example, that white, middle-class students care more about the rights of workers within the developing world than about those of workers who clean their dorm rooms, cook their meals, and dispose of their garbage. So, too, the channeling of energy into the crusade to expel Coke products from campuses has been a finite, winnable, and therefore gratifying, campaign. Above all, the appeal of the movement coalition against Wal-Mart has been irresistible. Unlike, say, Nike, or the Gap, the retail colossus is not simply a leading competitor in an industrial market. Wal-Mart’s monopoly on trade and consumption makes its ability to organize labor and markets equivalent to an entire mode of production, impacting everything from local patterns of land development to the worldwide sustainability of resource utilization (Lichtenstein 2005). In facing down Wal-Mart, sweatshop protesters find themselves in a much more broader coalition of activists, integrating many different interests and constituencies in the fight against a common target. In this diverse company, labor exploitation is no longer a single-issue struggle, but rather one of an array of concerns that the public cannot easily ignore. Moreover, the opportunity (not available in the case of Nike) to link Wal-Mart’s exploitation of its large domestic workforce with labor abuses among its offshore suppliers demonstrates all too clearly that the fight for fair labor can and should be genuinely transnational.
Nothing’s too good
Given that sweatshops are a structural by-product of capitalist growth, how much anti-sweatshop activity has actually come out as anti-capitalist in orientation? To what end should anyone fight for fair labor without demanding a redistribution of power within the workplace, or an alteration of the
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property regimes by which corporations subsist? Like the Communists who organized in the CIO unions in the 1930s, many activists have submerged their long-term critiques of the capitalist system in the interest of building a sweatshop movement around uncontroversial, short-term goals. As each new ‘reformist’ strategy falls short, they are then in a position to press for stronger, more radical moves. Consciousness builds on the steady erosion of the belief that capitalism can be a munificent system for workers if only they are treated fairly and given some stake in the system.
As with the popular front against Fascism in the 1930s, it has also proven more strategic to unite against a particular version of capitalism � neo- liberalism � rather than capitalism as such. A similar choice confronted many sectors of the anti-globalization movement. While some global justice protestors (and, curiously, some mainstream media organizations) favor the moniker ‘anti-capitalist,’ the dominant spirit, if it is at all possible to define such a thing in this ‘movement of movements,’ leans toward pushing for alternatives to neo-liberalism. In practice, that means targeting the multinationals along with those who write the rules of neo-liberal trade for them, and building coalitions around more sustainable and democratic forms of trade and development.
While ‘anti-capitalist’ critique is often considered too redolent of the old left, anti-consumerism is one of the most visible, culturalist faces of the global justice activism, embodied in the rallying cry of No Logo, the title of Naomi Klein’s generative 2000 book (Klein 2000). As a tendency, anti-consumerism cuts a broad swathe � from the ‘pure church’ advocates who extol the virtues of an alternate economy (based on barter, recycling, or second-hand consumption, and self-sufficiency) to the more urbane ‘adbusters’ and ‘culture jammers’ who do battle on the field of commercial icons and symbols. For the former, the calamity of commodity overproduction and eco-collapse is a direct result of ‘our’ addiction to consumer goods; a ready cure beckons. For the latter, global brands and their advertising support-systems, are the new demonology; exorcising them from our lives is an essentially Rousseauian impulse (Heath & Potter 2004). The internationally-observed social marketing campaigns like Buy Nothing Day or TV Turnoff Week are moratoria on our addiction, and the first steps down the road of downshifting to a simpler life.
Though sweatshop politics has its place within anti-consumerist circles*as one more arrow in the No Logo quiver � the obverse, that anti-consumerism has its place in anti-sweatshop politics, is not so certain. Appeals to reduce consumption, or to redirect production into sustainable channels are not a high priority, and are still likely to be seen as an awkward fit, for most labor activists weaned on the gospel of raising standards for workers. A June 2005 article in the satirical organ, The Onion, showcased some of this dissonance in ‘reporting’ the sentiments of Chen Hsieh, a South China factory worker, who ‘expressed his disbelief over the ‘‘sheer amount of shit Americans will buy’’.’
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Among the items he was often asked to manufacture were ‘plastic-bag dispensers, microwave omelet cookers, glow-in-the-dark page magnifiers, Christmas-themed file baskets, animal-shaped contact-lens cases, and adhesive- backed wall hooks.’ Chen questioned the need for superfluous kitchen commodities: ‘I can understand having a good wok, a rice cooker, a tea kettle, a hot plate, some utensils, good china, a teapot with a strainer, and maybe a thermos. But all these extra things � where do the Americans put them? How many times will you use a taco-shell holder?’ His brother works at breaking down computer waste sent from the US and had asked Chen to join him. Despite the hazards involved in handling highly toxic components, it might be a more attractive work option for Chen than ‘looking at suction-cup razor holders and jumbo-dice keychains all day.’ However, he decides to turn down the offer, adding: ‘Somehow, the only thing more depressing than making plastic shit for Americans is destroying the plastic shit they send back’ (The Onion 2005).
To achieve its comic effect, the article mimics the generic template for news reporting of labor exploitation in South China’s labor-intensive export factories. It even cites a representative from the Hong Kong-based labor advocacy group China Labour Bulletin (a leading source of regional information about labor conditions) to the effect that ‘complaints like Chen’s are common among workers in China’s bustling industrial cities.’ In real life, a complaint of this sort would be an eminently rational response to the overproduction of dubious items. Indeed, it resonates with a long tradition of critiques about the waste of labor expended on producing useless goods (Morris 1885). Alienation in the workplace has often been tied to the resentment of worker-participants in an economy they perceive to be absurd or irrational. Since China is fast developing its own consumer markets (already under immense pressure from the problem of overproduction), Chen’s complaint could just as well be directed at production for domestic consumption.
Yet it is improbable that a critique like Chen’s would register on the public media landscape, nor would it be likely to take precedence, on given the agenda of the labor movement, over complaints about basic working conditions and pay. When set alongside the task of alleviating the misery of those at the very bottom of the global labor market, foundational challenges to the prevailing system of production and consumption are considered to be the privilege of the relatively secure. Calls for reducing or limiting production are more likely to be viewed simply as invitations to take away jobs. Indeed, the history of labor politics is littered with lost opportunities to join movements that dispute, or alter, the gospel of growth that pervades the business world. Time and time again, the prospect of delivering material abundance has been an easier path for labor leaders to take, no less than for the ‘captains of consciousness’ in the advertising game. Who would risk the ridicule that comes with preaching
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self-restraint? After all, for those who have been socially and economically denied, a lifestyle of ‘voluntary simplicity’ holds little immediate attraction. As the maverick Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer Big Bill Haywood once replied, when asked why he smoked oversized cigars, ‘nothing’s too good for the proletariat.’
On the other side, moralistic critics of consumption are often invariably insensitive, or even oblivious, to the livelihoods that are tied to servicing the goods economy. In these circles, social change is a job for an enlightened vanguard with little inclination for heeding popular opinion and even less time for institution-building. As the manifesto of the flagship Adbusters magazine put it, ‘You don’t need a million people to start a revolution. You just need a passionate minority who sees the light, smells the blood and pulls off a set of well-coordinated social marketing strategies’ (Adbusters 1998). For the devotee of Adbusters, an image campaign that is critical of sweated Nike sneakers is primarily an assault on consumerism as an immoral way of life, hostile to the natural environment and human psyche alike. Secondarily, it is an opportunity to push the Adbusters own earth-friendly Blackspot Unswoosh sneaker (made with vegetarian leather and hemp, and recycled soles, and designed to give Nike a ‘swift kick in the brand’) which trades on its alternative anti-logo status. For the sweatshop activist, the same kind of image campaign is more likely an opportunity to push Nike to raise labor standards among its supplier workforce. Given the power of an industry leader to alter global market norms, holding Nike’s brand to ransom is potentially a more effective multiplier of labor benefits than investing activist energy in a politically correct shoe for consumers who may be seeking socially-conscious status.
These two impulses are not mutually exclusive; they are both distinctive efforts to exploit the cultural power of a global consumer brand by appropriating some of its accumulated value. But they would each benefit from integrating more of the others’ philosophies and goals. Concerns about the unsustainability of a consumer civilization can, and should be, addressed at the point of production. Thus, anti-sweatshop campaigns would be less vulnerable to cooption by the CSR juggernaut if they were able to broaden the definition of fair labor and fair trade to include factors that are all too often ‘externalized.’ Wages and workplaces, for example, should be adequate enough to protect the social and environmental wellbeing of communities both in the host location and elsewhere. It is more difficult for corporate PR agents to spin the brand out and away from socio-environmental relationships with communities than from wage contracts with individuals. On the other side, anti-consumerists ought to consider production workers and labor-based organizations as likely allies rather than as hapless victims of false conscious- ness. They would therefore be less vulnerable to critiques that they rely on individual acts of moral volunteerism if they hitched their wagon to progressive
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institutional forces with proven records of trust among communities and popular constituencies such as unions.
As always, the challenge is to link movements of ideas with movements of action, and to show people that they have overlapping, if not exactly complementary, goals. When it comes to labor and environmentalism, the potential alliance between Reds and Greens � or, in colloquial American parlance, between Teamsters and Turtles � remains one of the great unfulfilled legacies of the twentieth century. Economic globalization has only made the spirit of this coalition all the more urgent.
Note
1 A discussion about whether the anti-sweatshop movement fits this description came up in the course of a workshop I attended at the conference on Global Companies-Global Unions-Global Research-Global Campaigns, held in New York City, in February 2006, http://www.ilr. cornell.edu/globalunionsconference/. In part, this chapter is a response to that workshop debate.
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