Anti-Sweatshop Movement

Sweatshop practices have existed in labor history since the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th century. Since that time, collective protests and welfare reforms have succeeded in enacting and enforcing progressive labor laws. From the end of the 20th century on, the globalization of capitalism and the development of transnational corporations have brought back this social issue on an unprecedented scale in North America, Western Europe, and more predominantly, in the Third World countries. Through structural adjustment programs, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have exerted considerable pressure on low-income states to embrace neoliberal reforms, create export-oriented industries, and promote free-trade zones. To manufacture their products, Europe-and U.S.-based clothing and apparel manufacturers have taken advantage of these policy shifts and have been increasingly subcontracting companies whose assembly-line plants are set up in Africa and Asia as well as in the Caribbean Basin and Central America.

Since the early 1990s, anti-sweatshop movement activists have denounced the abuse of workers in factories overseas by the subcontractors of manufacturers and retailers such as Liz Claiborne, Nike, Phillips–Van Heusen, Sears, Gap Inc., and Wal-Mart, among others. Workers, mainly young women, are not only exposed to excessive compulsory overtime, lack of insurance coverage, and low pay (which is far below subsistence wage), but they are also submitted to forced birth control, unhealthy food, and verbal harassment. Furthermore, their unionization efforts have been continuously repressed by governments that rely heavily on foreign investors to meet the multilateral agencies economic requirements. These social struggles often involve physical intimidation, death threats, and mass firings of union supporters by company management, which may ultimately decide to close down and relocate the factory. The resulting lockout leaves workers unemployed and, very often, without any other viable livelihood.

To contest these working conditions and labor law violations, multilayered strategies have been elaborated by local activists, international labor unions, and non-governmental organizations such as the Campaign for Labor Rights, the National Labor Committee, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, and the United Students Against Sweatshops. Their difficult implementation reveals the tangled complexities of the globalization process. The strength and the durability of these transnational networks are in fact conditioned by their ability to cross gender, geographical, linguistic, and social boundaries in order to develop an effective local activism in the Third World countries and to warn the consuming audience in the Western postindustrial centers against these illegal manufacturing processes.

For the most part, garment workers are facing a domestic historical and political context that makes problematical even the possibility of establishing trade unions and calling for collective bargaining. For instance, the authoritarian nature of Latin American states has long been supported by the United States and, to a lesser extent, by the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations in order to contain communist movements and popular protests. Deprived of a solid union tradition and submitted to desperate socioeconomic conditions, workers are frequently reduced to coordinating their activities on a clandestine basis before being able to create their own independent organization and initiate negotiations. Their legal recognition is contested not only by subcontractors but also by local governmental authorities, which may receive the implicit support of U.S. embassies.

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