United Students Against Sweatshops

United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) is a youth and student-run grassroots labor network organizing for worker’s rights. USAS’s core model focuses on students leveraging the institutional purchasing (and boycott) power of their universities to organize for worker’s rights in local and international contexts. While most commonly used to connote labor exploitation in global apparel production, USAS defines the term sweatshop more broadly as “the daily abuses of the global economic system.” USAS’s approach is that only through labor organizing can meaningful changes to poverty be made at home and around the world. It runs in the internationalist vein of labor with a focus on responding to globalized capital through a globalization of labor organizing.

USAS was formed in 1998 by organizers and student interns at the ...