… As bad as the situation is in Cavite, it does not begin to compare with Sri Lanka, where extended tax holidays [for the multinationals] means that towns cannot even provide public transportation for Export Processing Zone workers. The roads they walk to and from the factories are dark and dangerous, since there is no money for street lights. Dormitory rooms are so overcrowded that they have white lines painted on the floor to mark where each worker sleeps – they 'look like car parks', as one journalist observed.
…Then there is the matter of wages. In the Cavite zone, the minimum wage is regarded more as a loose guideline than as a rigid law. If $6 a day is too onerous, investors can apply to the government for a waiver on that too. So while some zone workers earn the minimum wage, most – thanks to the waivers – earn less.” (No Logo, Naomi Klein)
The very firms which promote themselves in the West as champions of individualism and freedom reduce whole generations of young women in the East to abject poverty. It was a sense of injustice and outrage at such practices that encouraged North American students to start the anti-sweatshop campaign in the early 1990s.
The first anti-sweatshop campaigns were not started by students. The campaigns involved human rights groups, trade unions such as the SEIU (Service Employees International Union), third-world non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community organisations such as churches.
They took on the brand name giants in the clothing and shoe industry such as Nike and Gap bringing to light the third world sweatshops that lay behind the trendy adverts and high street stores. Their actions were mostly demonstrations and consumer boycotts.
This wasn’t unique to the USA – in Britain groups like Oxfam, Christian Aid and the World Development Movement were also raising the issue of sweatshop labour in the 1990s, but with no real union involvement and with much less vigour and success.
Part of the reason for this difference lies in the specific situation in the US, where there is a much larger pool of immigrant labour from Latin America and South East Asia bringing sweatshop labour conditions right into the "land of opportunity". For instance, in 1995 the Department of Labour raided a barbed-wire compound in El Monte, California, where 72 Thai migrant workers were held captive and forced to work 18 hour days for $1 an hour.
Many Hispanic workers, such as the janitors in California, are actively organising unions. They are aware of the sweatshops “back at home” in El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and so on and are eager to use the union to improve conditions for their families and friends.
Coupled with this, US unions are also keen not to see their own wages and conditions undermined by direct competition (especially with Mexico, which is inside the Nafta free trade zone) with sweated labour.
In the US these campaigns culminated in the Clinton government forming the Apparel Industry Partnership (AIP) in 1996, composed of unions, consumer groups, human rights groups and the companies themselves.
This was a victory in the sense that the industry was forced to accept the idea of corporate responsibility, of the companies’ accountability for the conditions under which their goods were produced. In addition the AIP was to design mechanisms to prevent the worst excesses of sweatshop labour. What it designed was the Fair Labour Association (FLA), set up in November 1998 to monitor and enforce an agreed code of conduct.
Yet this code is very weak. If enforced it would do little to improve the conditions of the workers in the sweatshops. It is voluntary: corporations monitor themselves. Lastly the corporate giants sit on the board and have a veto. And for all this they then get to sew a “no sweats” label in their clothes!
Shortly after this agreement was reached it became clear that the FLA was just a cover for business as usual, and a public relations coup for the sweatshop giants. As a result, the major unions and NGOs withdrew from the FLA. UNITE (the Union of Needle, Industrial and Textile Employees) has been in the forefront of continuing the campaign against sweatshops and linking up with the student movement.
Up till the autumn of 1997 students didn’t play any distinct, organised role in this growing movement. But that summer the unions took students from the campuses, trained them as union organisers and sent them out into some of the most union-hostile areas to knock on doors, hang around outside factory gates, and argue for people to join the union.
These activists went back to campus and started the Sweat-Free Campus campaigns in 20 colleges and universities. So in the US the unions were very much the originators for this student movement.
Universities selling the rights to produce clothes with their college logo is a $2.5 billion industry in the USA. The students demanded that their university administrations take responsibility for the conditions under which the clothes bearing their logos are produced. This meant adopting a code of conduct that the businesses would be obliged to abide by if they wanted their license renewed.
The movement took off in the Spring of 1998 with students on dozens of campuses organising teach-ins, demos and sit-ins. In July 1998 these campus groups formed United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). This has adopted four main provisions for the code: full public disclosure of factory locations, enforcement of the rights of women, independent monitoring, and a living wage. Some campus groups have added the right to organise unions.
Imaginative ways of building the campaign have included mock fashion shows, knit-ins, and bringing sweatshop workers to speak on campuses. But it is the occupations that have really done the business.
These typically begin with a march of a few hundred to the university president’s office and demand that s/he sign the USAS code. If refused, a small nucleus of 20 to 30 occupy the administration block or president’s office until s/he agrees to sign the code.
At the University of Arizona a march ended at the president’s office demanding a commitment to the USAS code. When he refused, 35 students sat in the administration building for eight days until he finally gave in and signed the code.
At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 30 activists went into occupation on the back of a rally of 250. It lasted five days, growing every day until it was 300-strong. The unions and students organised rallies outside in support. Within less than a week they had won three out of four of the demands.
These successful sit-ins at a handful of campuses launched USAS as a national movement. After a half-dozen sit-ins it spread to 150 campuses. As of autumn 1999, 15 universities agreed to full public disclosure of sweatshop locations and 17 agreed to living-wage provisions.
But 100 University administrations have signed up to the FLA as protection against USAS campaigns, which argues against joining the FLA. The Department of Labor met with USAS leaders in July 1999 to try and get them to support the FLA – and failed.
Now the struggle has moved on and generalised its aims, with sit-ins and protests at the Department of Labor. In October 1999 USAS organised a day of action demanding that all universities withdraw from the FLA. To make its code enforceable, USAS has developed its own monitoring organisation – the Workers Rights Commission (WRC) – with support from unions, including UNITE, and Third World human rights groups.
A campaign has begun on the campuses to force administrations to withdraw from the FLA and join the WRC. The University of Pennsylvania was the first to do so in February, followed by five more the same month.
This focus on the workers’ low pay and the issue of subcontracting as a way of avoiding direct corporate responsibility has meant that these campus struggles have also begun to relate to university workers – some campaigns have added demands that all workers on campus are paid a living wage, including those employed by subcontractors. These demands have been won at John Hopkins University.
This is yet another step away from the attitude of “victims in the far away Third World” towards a clear internationalist, working class orientation. Another good offshoot has been reaching out to build anti-sweatshop groups in the local high schools.
The Seattle anti-World Trade Organisation protest was a key boost to the movement, both in terms of highlighting its existence and of making the activists already involved more militant. One of the most famous photos coming out of Seattle is a group of youth sitting down and being pepper-sprayed by a robocop – they are from a Californian anti-Gap group, mostly high school and college students.
These groups participated in Seattle, helped build it, and have been totally fired-up by the experience of it, taking that energy back into the campus campaigns, with the sit-ins and lock-downs. Most importantly it is being re-exported through the world-wide anti-globalisation movement.
The situation in Britain – no less than the States – is crying out for a similar campaign. The fact that McDonalds is targeted on anti-capitalist protests is no coincidence. Like Nike and Gap, it is a symbol of corporate greed, low pay, dehumanising conditions and anti-unionism. The racist immigration and asylum laws mean that there is a significant illegal and semi-legal sweatshop industry here too.
Importantly, there is growing resentment at the multinationals. Nike, for example, are about to splash out £300m on a sponsorship deal with Manchester United, already a target for their ruthless exploitation of the replica football shirt market.
As in the States, Nike is also active on the campuses – at Goldsmiths College in South London, Nike actually sponsor children. How soon before it bids for an Education Action Zone and we get “Nike days” at schools like the “Coca-Cola” days in American schools?
This is why we need to build an anti-sweatshop campaign here, now, on the campuses and in the unions. In every college socialists should build on the anti-capitalist mood that exists - and was shown in Prague in September - and turn that mood towards a campaign against corporate targets and college authorities that collaborate with them.
Set up "No Sweat" campaigns now. Use the Panorama programme to launch a meeting. Link up across the colleges and take the issue into the schools and FE colleges.
Such a campaign should link up with the National Union of Knitwear, Footwear and Apparel Trades (KFAT) and demand resources from the TUC, including paying for organisers, publicity and office space. Links must be made with Turkish, Kurdish and Indian workers organisations who know where the sweatshops are in Britain. Other links could be built with bands like Radiohead and football supporters’ organisations who are sick of the invasion of our cultural space by these sweatshop merchants.
This way we can do two things: help organise and help win some valuable reforms for low-paid and badly treated workers; and provide a bridge to extend the anti-capitalist movement among college and school students and immigrant and workers’ organisations.