ABSTRACT

Our research examines the development of political alliances that use the power of consumers to expand worker rights and improve the conditions of production in the global economy. Whether it is a boycott of brand names or demands to restrict University licensing contracts with apparel products manufacturers, the evolution of strategies that utilize leverage at the 'point of consumption' serve to link student, consumer, and community activists to labor organizations, both at home and abroad. We examine four carefully selected cases where labor rights advocates in the U.S.A. used boycotts or other consumer-based strategies to influence working conditions in sweatshops abroad. Our cases were selected for their historical timing, significance, and extent of involvement of a broad range of movement organizations. Allies at the “point of consumption,” we contend, are important fixtures for the advance of worker organization and rights globally. Like the support provided by progressive era, middle class suffragists to the mass strikes and struggles of working class immigrant women following the tragic Triangle Factory fire in 1911, today’s struggle against the sweatshop may involve a cross class alliance that is also global in scope.

Introduction:

By all measures, the American consumer has the most voracious appetite in the world. Between 1980 and 2000, American consumers spent trillions of dollars on products and services. Over $160 billion are spent annually in the U.S.A. on apparel products alone (Howard 1997). Workers plugged into a complex network linking geographically diffuse multinational corporations and international labor markets produce these garments, like an ever-growing portion of all products and services. Across industry after industry, major corporate name brands, from Nike, Ford and the Gap to Starbucks and Sprint spread their economic activities across the globe and in the process give form to what is generally referred to as ‘globalization’. Untold numbers of workers are involved in extracting and refining raw materials, producing products across multiple industrial sectors, delivering commodities, disposing the waste of commodity production and consumption, and communicating via information channels stretching between peoples and communities the world over. Above it all, corporations and subcontractors pinch and squeeze economies at an ever-tightening cost margin, seeking to cut costs, expand market share and boost profit margins. For the apparel sector, the sweatshop and its notoriously miserable labor conditions are but one consequence of the cost-cutting behavior of these global corporations in a deregulated world (See Piore 1997). Yet the image associated with the consumption of most commodities in no way reveals the faces of those involved in producing (or disposing of) the product. In the case of apparel production, the images of fashion hardly reflect the inhumane work and living conditions faced by millions of mostly female garment workers. Mystified by social, physical and cultural distances, the origins of consumer products as well as the labor conditions under which they are produced remain far from clear.

Added to these complex and obscure phenomena is yet another layer of activity obfuscating the web of human activity involved in the production, distribution and disposal of commodities: mass commercial advertising. Over $50,000,000,000 is spent annually on advertising in the U.S.A. alone. To put this in perspective, the federal government allocated approximately $37 billion to all public education in 1999. Every day roughly 3000 commercial messages flirt with the consciousness and symbolic horizon of each individual in America (Business Week 1991). Leslie Savan (1995: 1) estimated “16,000 ads flicker across an individual’s consciousness daily.” On the conservative side, this means that an estimated “12 billion display ads, 3 million radio commercials and more than 200,000 TV commercials are dumped into North America’s collective unconscious” per day (Lasn 1999:19).

How do people develop the political and cultural tools to uncover and expose an otherwise invisible realm of commodity production? How, in particular, do consumers discover the “sweat” behind the fashionable images of garments and in the process fight for workers rights globally? Our paper investigates this question by exploring the changing political alliances and strategies of labor rights advocates at the “point of consumption” in the 1990s.

Our paper examines the development of political alliances against sweatshops that use the power of consumers to expand worker rights and improve the conditions of production in the global economy. We explore four important cases where worker and consumer-oriented activists mobilized a concerted effort. Two important contributions are made with this work. First, we provide an empirical account of the movement. Secondly, our analysis sheds light on three major analytical concerns: the interorganizational structure of worker-consumer alliances, the extent to which these alliances represent a coalescence between working and middle class political forces, and the significance of the “point of consumption” in an age where globalization and hyper-materialism mask the conditions of production at home and abroad. Our analysis and suggestions parallel those of many seasoned activists who acknowledge the growing importance of linking the point of consumption to the “point of production”, i.e. consumers and workers, in order to build both organizational strength and moral authority in a global struggle for democracy, equity and freedom.

We hope to maintain a sense of the global significance of this work as well as to discover some concrete political dynamics of the contemporary anti-sweatshop movement. Specifically, we explore the evolution of and ingredients to a movement that has strategically challenged – with the hope of expanding worker rights globally – the brand names of popular fashion and exposed apparel manufacturers as sweatshop “rats.”[1] The various campaigns associated with this movement have targeted the “image” of apparel products in order to reveal beneath the opulent images of fashion an inhumane exploitation of workers. Furthermore, we identify the way in which labor-consumer-based activism is oriented toward demystifying the commodity and improving international labor rights. The movement activism behind these efforts, we observe, are self-consciously evolving toward a goal of shaping not only how consumer goods are made but perceived.

Behind the Image: The Political Economy of International Apparel Production

Sixty-percent of all garments sold in the US are imported, mostly from Asian countries, followed by Latin American and Caribbean countries (Ross 1997). In 1980, just 20 years ago, 70 percent of all apparel purchased in the U.S. was produced domestically (Kernaghan 1997). Today, production in the apparel industry is a truly global affair. In fact, no other industry exemplifies the apparel sector in conjuring the image of globalization. Competition is intense among the tens of thousands of global contractors seeking markets through the large retail chains and corporate name brands. Highly mobile factories in search of the lowest wage seek to expand their profit margins amid the squeeze between the high-profit demands of global retailers and the constraints of local labor markets. Throughout the world, companies in hundreds of countries actively export apparel products to a few importing countries. Driven by the retail giants of the world, the fates of millions of workers across the globe are sealed by the command exercised by corporations like Wal-Mart over the internal markets of rich importing countries.

Large-scale forces that undermined the post-world war II “accord” between apparel sector unions and garment manufacturers in the U.S. establish the structural background under which the global sweatshop thrives. The first indicator of global restructuring in this industry is in the shift of apparel manufacturing jobs from industrial countries of the global North to the global South. In the decade of the 1980s alone, over 850,000 apparel manufacturing jobs were lost in the industrial North, most of which occurred in the U.S. while a roughly equivalent number of apparel sector jobs were created in the developing world, mostly Asia and the Caribbean (Mandle 2000). It was during this period that apparel unions in the rich countries experienced radical membership hemorrhage. In 1969, the largest apparel union, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), had a membership of 457,000. By the time the ILGWU merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in 1995, their membership was less than 200,000 (Ross 1997).

At the same time, the U.S. government, through various international aid and regional development programs, began funneling billions of dollars into the development of “investment friendly” export processing zones and industrial parks throughout the Caribbean and Central America. These efforts were buttressed by the structural adjustment policies of international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, that pressed an export-oriented framework on third world economies while also emphasizing cuts in social spending, fiscal austerity, and macro-economic deregulation. Coincidentally, many developing countries shifted national economic policy away from import substitution industrialization and toward an export-oriented model of development, also encouraged by U.S. trade policy.[2] During the 1980s, the precursor to NAFTA and the FTAA were developed under Reagan. The Caribbean Basin Initiative opened investment in the islands while also encouraging the reorganization of those island-economies to serve as export platforms for U.S.-based multinationals. At the same time, political and military conflicts in Central America sought to contain leftist movements and consolidate “investor friendly” nations in the region, presaging the expansion of export processing zones throughout Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and more recently, Nicaragua. It was these arrangements that brought workers from the devastated rural sectors of these countries to the expanding industrial parks that produce goods for U.S.-based and other foreign corporations. In sum, as one seasoned activist put it, the U.S. role in the region “went from small scale wars fought with guns to large scale economic wars fought with the dollar.”[3]

The stabilization of authoritarian regimes after the regional wars, first in Asia and then in Central America, created the political institutions that readily succumbed to the pressures of international financial institutions and multinational corporations. Moreover, many authoritarian regimes, from Indonesia, Burma, and the Philippines to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, all worked closely to ensure that the export processing platforms would operate free from independently organized labor unions. Massive rural migration and economic desperation following the violence and civil wars that struck so many of these countries insured a regular supply of labor.

The role of U.S. military intervention and support for rightist authoritarian regimes, it is important to recall, was part of a larger, concerted anti-communist strategy directed at much of the Third world. Part of that effort, ironically, involved U.S. labor, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). As part of a larger strategy that entranced the leaders of the largest unions in the U.S. during WWII and throughout much of the Cold War, the AFL-CIO purged its own radicals and developed a working relationship with the State Department to orchestrate the American Institute for Free Labor Development (See Sims 1992). The AIFLD merged the worst practices of business unionism in the U.S. with the CIA and U.S. government Cold War agenda.[4] These efforts systematically undermined independent and left wing labor unions in many parts of the world. The anticommunist ideologies and practices of the AIFLD, by undermining the development of international labor solidarity based on democratic, social unionism, contributed to the exploitation of already vulnerable workers in the labor markets of many Third world countries.

Ironically, the AIFLD’s help in creating highly oppressive labor conditions, along with U.S. government support of rightist authoritarian regimes, proved highly attractive to U.S. corporations seeking a “friendly investment climate” where extremely low labor costs and malleable workforces are virtually guaranteed. U.S. apparel manufacturing investments skyrocketed, moving billions of dollars in capital to the Caribbean and Central America each year for two decades. Meanwhile, between 1979 and 1992, an average of 41,400 textile and apparel jobs were lost each year in the U.S. with U.S. apparel employment falling nearly 20 percent and real wages in that industry falling 17 percent (Kernaghan 1997). Today, the average garment worker in the U.S. earns less in real wages than in 1955. While U.S. apparel unions responded with a ‘Buy American’ campaign, U.S. corporations eagerly sought to boost their profit margins with cheap labor in new investor friendly export processing zones, accelerating disinvestments from U.S.-based apparel manufacture (See Frank 1999). Shooting themselves in the foot, the business union leaders in the ILGWU and other AFL-CIO unions promoted a ‘Buy American’ campaign in response to the rise in imports from the very countries where U.S. manufacturers were moving. Pitching country against country, workers and their unions were placed under the thumb of cost-cutting investors who seek to attract the lowest bid for sewing clothes (or other products). Reinforcing this situation is a repressive political system, a desperately hungry, land-displaced populace, a very weak or non-existent independent labor movement, and the competitive pressures of the industry.

It is in this context that the morally repugnant sweatshop is replicated on a vast, global scale. Squeezed beneath it all are the workers – mostly young women, mostly subordinate ethnic groups in the various countries, mostly non-unionized. Labor repressive governments, authoritarian management styles, the ruthless demands for greater profit and market share by the mass retailers, and ever-shifting advertising-driven tastes of consumers, make for extremely hostile environments for workers. The National Labor Committee (1997), for example, reported a common dilemma faced by sweatshop workers the world over. Located in a U.S. government financed, duty free “Industrial Park,” workers at L.V. Myles sewed Pocahantas shirts for Disney. Their average daily wage amounted to less than $2.30. The cost for transportation into and out of the “Park” cost about $.37 per day. The average cost for two very modest “meals” per day was $1.22. After these expenses, workers took home about $.70 per full day of work. About 50 shirts were assembled by each worker each day, selling for nearly $11.00 a piece at Wal-Mart, meaning that the worker, making less than $2.30 per day produced shirts grossing $550 in the U.S.

So comes the sweatshop. Sweatshops exist to “minimize the cost of labor by whatever means necessary, to appropriate every penny of value” (Howard 1997:156). A recent case cited by Howard (1997) in Honduras highlights this cost-cutting imperative of the sweatshop. In 1996, sweatshop workers sewing shirts for Wal-Mart, paid at $.20/hour, were found to have been imported from Bangladesh. These workers, living as indentured workers – like the El Monte Thai workers found under slave conditions in California in 1995 – earned a few pennies per hour less than the typical Honduran worker found throughout the export zone did. Why import Bangladeshi workers to Honduras? As in the 19th century, so it is now, “the difference between cheap and cheaper labor… is the organizing principle of the sweatshop” (ibid 156).

New Political Opportunities for Unveiling the Sweatshop

The Role of Image in Apparel Markets: Fashion and

Today, unlike 30 years ago, the top 40 retail firms control approximately 80% of the U.S. apparel market (Ross 1997). As Frundt (1999) points out, this makes the garment industry particularly vulnerable to bad publicity and consumer boycotts. Walmart’s reaction to a 1992 Dateline story is a case in point. There the exposure of Wal-Mart’s widespread use of child labor in their contracted sweatshops embarrassed a company that touted a “Buy American” image (See Frank 1999). The public relations efforts by Wal-Mart and many of its allied merchandisers revealed a desperate attempt to uphold a positive “American” image of consuming at Wal-Mart and reel in the image of a profiteering Walton family. A few years later, the revelation that the Kathy Lee Gifford line at Wal-Mart was made under grossly exploitive sweatshop conditions aroused an even deeper PR backlash by Wal-Mart to the damage inflicted on Wal-Mart’s image and clothing retailers more generally.

It is in these types of campaigns that activists appeal to public sympathies, arousing a moral distaste for the practices of sweatshop production. Much of the power in the term “sweatshop” is drawn from its century-old association with images of child labor, exploitation of young women, and the brutal authority of sweatshop managers. In this way, the reservoir of meaning about sweatshops offers a potent historical and cultural legacy for use by labor rights activists. Activists can appropriate this cultural legacy as a resource to frame contemporary anti-sweatshop activism and build support for labor rights. Moreover, the cultural associations can be easily resurrected in the context of modern day sweatshop production. Images of young women and children cast against the backdrop of large factories and shantytowns in the third world reveal a pervasive and disturbing presence of inhumane work conditions. Moreover, when contrasted with the images of fashion – often eroticized and sexualized – the concept of sweatshop inverts these meanings by conveying an image of gendered exploitation.

These moral concerns over the sweatshop, survey results reveal, are not limited to a narrow band of the population either. In November 1995, researchers at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, found that “78 percent of U.S. consumers would avoid retailers if they knew they were dealing in sweatshop goods. Nor is this just talk. Seventy-five percent of the working poor (families earning only $15,000 a year or less) said they would dig into their pockets and pay $1.00 more for a $20 garment to be sure that it was not made in a sweatshop” (National Labor Committee 1996: 1).

In sum, the moral and gendered language of the “sweatshop” may betray the fetish over fashion, undermining the full effect of multi-million dollar corporate marketing campaigns. Contemporary production, distribution and marketing of apparel products thus hold within it a contradiction that may be utilized by anti-sweatshop activists. Ultimately, these conditions create an image-dependent market vulnerable to movement strategies aimed at the point of consumption.

Unions, Human Rights and Students

As the ILGWU and ACTWU declined in membership, new strategies begin to emerge as the AFL-CIO and many of its affiliated unions – mostly business unions – began to flirt with aspects of social unionism. Practices consonant with the concept of social unionism reflect a greater willingness to forge non-labor alliances, to develop internationalist agendas, and engage in non-conventional political practices. Bonacich (2001) examines the development of new strategies among unionists and worker rights advocates in the L.A. garment sector. Among these strategies are corporate campaigns, community organizing, and the creation of workers centers that offer numerous services to aid workers, irrespective of union membership. These strategies developed by workers and workers’ rights advocates in the L.A. garment sector are not purely a local affair: the main apparel sector union in the U.S., UNITE! is the product of a 1995 merger between ACTWU and the ILGWU. UNITE! has deliberately set course for a more activist unionism both within the U.S. and abroad. These developments within the U.S. labor movement, and apparel unions in particular, coincided with changes in middle class human rights activism in Central America.

As the civil wars subsided in Central America in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many human rights groups shifted their energies to the conditions faced by workers in the growing maquila sectors of the region. Along these lines, labor rights organizations formed, such as the Campaign for Labor Rights, to work with unions and other human rights groups. The battle over NAFTA expanded labor’s alliance base and brought new constituencies into the struggle for global economic justice. The student left, progressive religious organizations, some left-leaning environmentalists, and human rights activists all found areas of increasingly common concern in the intersection of labor rights and the global movement of corporations. These new alliance structures opened opportunities to advance strategies against sweatshops (and other issues involving economic globalization) at both the point of production and point of consumption.

Worker and Consumer Alliances in the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

Methodology

In this paper, we analyze four cases where worker and consumer alliances in the apparel industry challenged sweatshops during the 1990s. We do this using a wide range of data, including in-depth interview, newsletters, newspaper articles and other primary and secondary sources. Leaders of labor unions and labor and human rights groups were interviewed, including people from UNITE, USLEAP, NLC, and USASS. In all, 8 interviews were conducted in person and by phone between Feburary 2001 and April 2001. Our sources enabled us to reconstruct the history for each case and make comparisons across the cases on salient dimensions. The interviews were somewhat informal, with a few standardized, structured questions aimed at ascertaining The selection of cases for this study was done with an eye for capturing both real historical developments and posing analytically useful contrasts. Our depiction of the four cases outlines a brief history of each campaign and its significance to a broader movement that aims to expose injustices in sweatshops and build alliances to advance worker rights globally. Each of the cases examined in this paper offer an important window into labor movement strategies that use the power of the “consumer” to strengthen international labor rights and unveil the conditions of sweatshop production. Our definition of the consumer, and the point of consumption, is broader than the typical use of that term: we consider consumption as both an institutional action as well as a behavior of individuals. Movement strategies that focus on the point of consumption thus target not only individual consumers, but the institutions that mediate the consumption act. Figure One summarizes our four cases and the main actors involved in the study.

Figure 1: Depicts each case, alliances, target and opposition in the antisweatshop movement.

Case

Workers

Allies

Consumer/Target

Opponents

PVH

UNITE

PVH Workers

US/GLEP

CALC

Human Rights Watch

CISCAP

US Consumer

PVH Retail Outlets

PVH

Apparel Industry

GAP

UNITE

Gap Workers

Unions

Global Exchange

Religious Groups

ALC

US Consumer/

Gap Retail Outlets

Gap Corporate

GAP

Universities

UNITE

USAS

Labor Groups

University Purchasing/

Bookstores

FLA

Apparel and Shoe Industry

Cities

UNITE

AFSCME

Labor Council

City Council

Mid-Class Constituency

City Government Procurement

Non-Union Industry

Mayor’s Office

From Shop Floor to Department Store: Advancing workers rights at Phillips Van Heusen

Globalization has presented great difficulties for labor organizing and signaled the need for international solidarity and communication in advancing workers rights. As the apparel industry moved south and retail apparel stores concentrated their holdings and coordinated their political efforts to promote “friendly investment climates” abroad, the labor rights movement has responded by changing their tactics and allies to combat these political and economic ills. The struggle at a Guatemalan Phillips Van Heusen plant demonstrates the challenges and possibilities faced as labor explored new approaches to worker rights at home and abroad. In this case, success came only after efforts were coordinated between workers, consumers and human rights activists in a stride toward international labor solidarity. This case also illustrates a shift in tactics and structure of US apparel unions. As capital began freely crossing borders, the business union model proved especially inept at advancing worker rights as textile unions like ACTWU and ILGLU were clearly fighting a losing battle. A change in union tactics, signaled by ACTWU and ILGLU merger into UNITE, focused attention on transnational solidarity efforts in advancing worker rights, both in the US and abroad. This change is exemplified in UNITE’s joining forces with other worker rights groups in the PVH campaign.

Guatemala is a very popular country for the apparel industry to locate factories; it features a very disciplined workforce in a political economic climate of low wages, minimal taxes and a government very cooperative with the needs and interests of factory owners (Armbruster, 1997; Frundt and Peterson, 1992). As neoliberal reforms of structural adjustment, trade liberalization and draconian economic and governmental reforms took hold, Guatemala became ripe for the setting up of free trade maquilas. Phillips Van Heusen (PVH) contracts with hundreds of suppliers in dozens of countries (Elevenson-Estrada and Frundt 1995). After years of sweatshop abuses in the maquiladoras of Central America, the workers at a factory owned by a PVH approached US LEAP (then USGLEP) for ideas on organizing workers at PVH maquila plants in 1991. Shortly after the PVH workers began to organize into a union, the corporation responded with a swift and powerful anti-union campaign (Peterson, 1992; Armbruster, 1997). Management’s tactics included targeting and bribing, firing, intimidating and otherwise punishing union leaders and supporters. Despite the barrage of anti-union tactics and difficult legal challenges, the union persisted, meeting all government requirements for union recognition in 1992. Even though winning the legal requirements for recognition, PVH faced no legal recourse for failing to acknowledge the union and refusing to bargain with the workers. Though PVH was able to crush the fledgling union’s earlier actions, a larger, more coordinated effort was brewing with help from international labor groups in the North (USLEAP, 1999).

A second drive began on Labor Day (US), in 1996 with advice from UNITE and under the direction of USGLEP. The PVH union, USLEAP, and UNITE developed a brand new "coordinated crossborder organizing model." This model was a coordinated labor-organizing blitz that was international in scope, it included traditional shop floor organizing actions in Guatemala, trade pressure in Central America and international consumer pressure (Armbruster, 1997). As the PVH union was organizing workers in Guatemala, a series of actions were taking place in the US. During the holiday season of 1996, US/GLEP, Witnesses for Peace, CALC and others were conducting actions at the point of consumption, targeting JC Penney and other retailers. These actions were designed to raise consumer awareness of the labor conditions at PVH and pressure PVH to negotiate with the union (ibid.). Meanwhile, in Guatemala, amid overt repression and apathy from the Guatemalan Labor Ministry, the PVH union maintained a lower profile and limited their action at the point of production. The principal aim of this new organizing effort was to embarrass, discredit, and morally degrade the image of PVH in the US so that workers in Guatemala could secure more leverage in their contract negotiations.

Faced with international pressure, and amidst a barrage of criticism, the campaign had seriously compromised the image of PVH. US/GLEP planned a demonstration at a Human Rights Watch fundraising event in New York. PVH CEO Bruce Klatsky just happened to be a board member of Human Rights Watch (Frundt, 1999). The connection of PVH to Human Rights Watch was more than just a fluke irony. The success of the PVH brand was dependent not just on pure marketing savvy, but also billing itself as a socially conscious corporation that embraced socially progressive ideals. PVH was in the business of looking good, not just in product lines but in their corporate image. To maintain their solid image as a good "corporate citizen" PVH CEO Bruce Klatsky had been involved with Human Rights Watch among other "socially progressive" organizations (Armbruster, 1997). Under scrutiny, PVH was pressured by HRW to agree to an independent review conducted by the organization. However, much to PVH’s irritation, the HRW report validated the workers concerns and found the allegations of the PVH union to be true, forcing PVH to negotiate with the union.

After four months of negotiations, PVH workers won substantial pay increases, grievance procedures, control of work conditions and a host of other benefits. The case set a precedent in showing the potential of a worker-consumer, international alliance in demanding independent monitoring of labor conditions as a means to advance labor rights globally. Other brand name manufacturers witnessed these events with concern. Many sought to preempt a similar assault on their corporate and apparel product images. In 1998, for example, Liz Claiborne agreed to carry out independent monitoring of its contractors (Frundt, 1999). More importantly, the PVH struggle signaled an important victory to efforts by human rights and labor activists to build global solidarity and advance the rights of workers. The campaign, however temporary in its success, served as a model for several successor campaigns.[5]

The traditional worker organization and mobilization models were crucial to the success of the PVH campaign. However, amid a brutal and repressive political economic climate it was hardly enough. Results came about only when transnational alliances were built and coordinated through labor and human rights groups who then targeted consumer sentiments and the image of the corporation. The success of the PVH campaign was in the unity and coordination of consumer actions in the United States with labor actions in Guatemala. Activists in the U.S. understood that by associating a corporation and its brand imagery with sweatshop production, its sales are likely to suffer, hitting the company where it hurts the most, the bottom line. Strategically uniting tactics at both the point of consumption as well as the point of production, the PVH campaign highlighted the continuing importance of linking consumer boycotts to worker organizing.

The Hegemony of Hip: The power of marketing and the challenges of The GAP campaign

The Gap case described here highlights how the political economy of apparel production exhibits a gap between product image and production realities. This is evident in the campaigns against the Gap and the contract system of sweatshops that make clothing with the Gap’s label. The anti-sweat movement has exploited the corporate dependence on image and labels to expose the conditions in which their products are made. In doing this, the movement has tied the label of “sweatshop” to the marketing image corporations invest heavily in creating and promoting. In these campaigns, new tactics have emerged that aim to reveal not only the relations of production in The Gap sweatshops, but to demystify the mass marketed images associated with The Gap’s aggressive, ultra-hip marketing tactics. From these efforts, The Gap, and its four billion-dollar apparel empire, has found that a sweatshop label is one that does not market well. The Gap owes its massive profit margins to a combination of super cheap labor and aggressive marketing tactics. Yet The Gap, like many apparel brands, actually operates few factories and is responsible for little in the manufacturing of clothing. Instead, The Gap contracts with local sweatshops, and focuses most of its efforts on marketing, public relations, and manufacturing an in-vogue public image. As Trim Bissel points out, "The GAP is not in the business of selling clothes, they are in the business of selling an image."[6] Indeed, the gap between product and image is quite large. In defining what it means to be cool in America, The Gap has created a corporate image that sells billions of dollars worth of clothing. Saturating youth culture with images of cool and hip throughout the industrialized world, The Gap’s multi-million dollar advertising campaigns prop up sales and profits, though leaving the image-dependent GAP quite vulnerable to revelations of misdeeds associated with their label.

The Gap’s “For Kids” line of clothing has more than one meaning, depending on what side of the border you are on. The American teenage girl is the target of million dollar-advertising campaigns and a leading market demographic and source of clothing consumption. In contrast, the Central American girl, is a principle source of surplus labor for clothing manufactures. The average age of a Central American apparel factory female worker is aged 17 and works shifts that last longer than 16 hours, usually 6 days a week (USLEAP). At maquila plants in Central America, the average pay given to a young woman who makes a shirt for the Gap is 18 cents per shirt. That shirt sells for 20 or more dollars at the Gap in the US, making the wages paid for each shirt less than 1 percent of the total price of the shirt (Figueroa, 1996). These impoverishing wages, not to mention the brutal conditions they are forced to work under, is the epitome of hyper-exploitation under globalization. It’s no wonder these workers have begun to band together and demand an end to the most flagrant injustices.

In 1993, workers at a Taiwanese-owned apparel plant in an El Salvador maquiladora known as Mandarin attempted to form a union. At the time, it was reported that most workers were under age women earning less than 60 cents an hour (Cassel, 1996). Mandarin workers, who are mostly women, labored up to 16-hour days making shirts for retailers like the Gap, Liz Claiborne, Eddie Bauer and other major name brands. Mandarin was quick to repress the union, illegally firing union leaders and locking out the work force. As if that was not enough, many workers were beaten by ex-Salvadoran militiamen led by a former Salvadorian military colonel (Cassel 1999). These actions were hardly noticed in the US, while The Gap posted record sales and continued to define the notion of hip across the malls. When asked by reporters about possible abuses in the Mandarin factory, CEO of The Gap, Donald Fisher, earning a 127 million dollar salary, denied the allegations stating that they could find no employee who had been subjected to harsh or inhumane working conditions (National Labor Committee, 1998). In a country where death squads roamed freely only a few years before, its no wonder people were afraid to speak out.

Things changed in 1995 when, UNITE, with the help of NLC, human rights groups and religious leaders mounted a nation wide campaign to expose the sweatshop abuses in The Gap’s factories, namely Mandarin. NLC organized a speaking tour of a former Mandarin worker and issued press releases. UNITE staged leafleting campaigns and storefront protests. This further exemplifies the expanding role of social unions like UNITE in forming alliances beyond labor. Religious and human rights groups joined in condemning the actions at the factories where gap apparel was made. National media attention was brought the plight of workers at the Mandarin plant, and public concern was voiced to The Gap. By April of 1995, Bob Herbert's articles exposing the sweatshops at Mandarin were appearing in the New York Times. Coordinated and uncoordinated consumer responses began to seriously affect the Gap’s corporate reputation, and bottom line. Charles Kernhagen sums up the effect best:

[When] the Gap stated to get hundreds and thousands of letters from people, and students especially, the Gap broke down, they couldn’t take it. They didn’t want to get letters from 200 high school students a day . . . We had high schools return grants they had gotten from the Gap saying they did not want the grant until the Gap to care of the people in El Salvador. Once you start going it just expands (Corporate Watch, pg. 3).

The Gap could no longer ignore the problem, as their public image was spiraling fast. The Gap proudly sent executives and Spanish speaking employees to investigate the situation, not surprisingly reporting that they had found no violations. The campaign continued, and more and more groups began to protest. Seeking to avoid further conflict, and citing “unanswered questions about working conditions in several factories,” The Gap cancelled all orders from the Mandarin factory, effectively shutting the factory down. “The Gap totally missed the point writes” Doug Cassock, "The goal was not to cut off El Salvador: that would only show the workers that their efforts to organize had, indeed, cost them their jobs. Instead the goal was to use The Gap's leverage to push for acceptable working conditions at Mandarin and elsewhere (pg. 1)." The actions against The Gap continued, and more reports of abuses from Salvadoran and other Central American factories continued to poor in. The Gap, finally realizing that it could no longer ignore, or dismiss the allegations, adopted a Corporate Code of Conduct, requiring the contractors it does business with to abide by the labor laws of the country the operate in.

The monitoring at the Mandarin factory continues and represents a battle won in a much larger conflict against the global proliferation of sweatshops. As the apparel industry has gotten more sophisticated in generating product-line images, the anti-sweatshop movement has adopted strategies to deconstruct them. In 1998 a 20/20 expose on sweatshops with the "Made in USA" label was broadcast showing Asian workers toiling for hours making clothing for The Gap for pennies on the island of Saipan, a US possession.[7] According to a report by the US Department of the Interior on the labor and trade conditions on the island, workers are routinely subjected to physical and verbal abuses, payless paydays, harassment, job "finders fees" and a host of other abuses (DOI, 1997). Though workers were at a US installation, they were routinely denied labor and human rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens. Laborers were brought in from places like China, Indonesia and the Philippines to make clothing at starvation wages. They were denied basic freedoms afforded to any other US resident and violated US labor and civil rights laws. At the same time, the island's status as a US possession enables The Gap to produce clothing there free from trade restrictions and tariffs, and could legally carry the “Made in USA” label.

In response to these new exposures of abuses by The Gap a new campaign, spearheaded by Global Exchange began to target the Gap where it really hurts — this time they went directly after their marketing image, not just their public image as a faceless corporation. Global Exchange and others began to subvert and "jam" the hip and cool imagery associated Gap - running ads that use the Gap’s marketing imagery to tell the world how they abuse human rights and profit form sweatshop labor. One ad features a model wearing the latest Gap merchandise with labels depicting the retail price, how much was paid to the worker, who made it and how they suffer. Others depict images and pictures of sweatshops with The Gap logos and slogan, "Is a living wage too much to ask for?" reads a caption of one "subvertisment" depicting a Gap sweatshop. It is an in your face approach to humiliating the corporation while undermining the marketing and images that define the look and feel of the particular product.

Like the PVH campaign, the campaign against the sweatshop abuses by The Gap is one that is constantly evolving. While money, marketing, public relations and pure business savvy can avoid answering questions of cutthroat business practices and human rights abuses, the anti-sweatshop movement is one that innovates tactically in their efforts to stop some of the most atrocious sweatshop abuses by a corporation. The Gap campaign demonstrates the importance and strength of worker and consumer alliances, as well as reveals how powerful campaigns directed at the image of a corporation can be. "Targeting the image of a corporation and their ties to sweatshops is a very effective weapon in an anti-sweatshop campaign…” says Tom Weatly of NLC. "When Kathy Lee Gifford appears on national television crying because it was revealed that her clothes were made by children in sweatshops . . . it undermined a million dollar marketing campaign, spelling near death for her line of clothing and Wal-Mart has yet to fully recover."[8]

Universities and Sweatshops

As demonstrated in the previous two cases, the corporate outsourcing of apparel production creates an opportunity to critique corporate brand images via abuses in the contract system. It also creates an opportunity for corporations to be held accountable for the system of sweatshops through legal and institutional means. This is demonstrated in the student anti-sweatshop movement and the formation of groups like United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). Through this movement, a broad alliance of students and labor groups across the USA questioned the business and licensing practices of their universities and demanded an end to sweatshop abuses around the world. USAS and the formation of the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) stemmed from a series of events that began with the realization by many students that their schools, through the licensing of university logoed products, were profiting along with a few dozen transnational corporations from the global proliferation of sweatshops. In a short period of time, students across more than 100 college campuses began demanding that their schools adopt codes of conduct, and monitoring programs that ensure that licensed apparel be sweat free. These efforts have been very effective, forcing many suppliers like Nike, Reebok, Addidas and others to reveal factory locations, implement monitoring procedures and change the way the do business with public entities like universities.

The history of the student anti-sweatshop movement is one of broad alliances, innovative tactics, and many lessons learned. USAS grew out of a Union Summer program organized by UNITE in 1997 that helped student interns learn how to organize on campus. In July of 1998, at a nationwide anti-sweatshop conference, with activists from more than 30 different schools, USAS was formed as an informal alliance working for international solidarity to form Codes of Conduct, an independent monitoring system, and facilitate cohesion between students and other labor and anti-sweatshop activists (USASS). Less than a year later, more than 100 schools had USAS chapters, and visible outrage about the various universities reluctance to respond was growing. In the winter of 1999 a wave of sit-ins and other campus-based actions across the United States and Canada brought increased attention to the connections between university apparel and sweatshops.

In attempts to abate student criticism of universities and apparel manufactures, manufactures, universities and NGO's worked with the Clinton Administration to form the FLA. Other companies, such as Nike and Reebok conducted internal audits of factories, but refused to make them public. Yet, despite the efforts of the apparel industry to sanitize the image of their industry, the public’s awareness of sweatshops and abuses continued to grow. In 1999, disgusted with the Clinton Administration's inability to draft a comprehensive proposal on monitoring apparel manufactures and ending sweatshop abuses, USAS formed the WRC, as an independent monitoring group of apparel manufactures. "The FLA is little more than a tool for the companies,” says Sarah Jacobson, "the WRC is a voice for the workers."[9] The WRC was founded as an independent factory-monitoring group to force university apparel suppliers into disclosing the locations of their factories and abandoning their reliance on sweatshops to make their products. USAS at its supporters feel that only throughout the independent monitoring provisions will the goal of sweat-free apparel be realized.

Though university apparel is a small part of the total market (less than 2 percent), it still constitutes a vital area of a 250 billion-dollar market to assert leverage through the combined institutional purchasing power of universities. Taken together, university clothing is one of the largest single markets for apparel in the country, and has began to impact a small but growing sector of the apparel manufacturing industry (Lee and Bernstein 2000). Furthermore, USAS and the student sweatshop movement have been very effective because the apparel industry is very concerned about its image as perceived by the “youth market” (Moberg 1999). As middle-class university students have allied themselves with workers rights groups and labor unions, they have been able to successfully question and challenge the way their schools do business with corporations. Though critics routinely dismiss the efforts of students as futile, the efforts of students and USAS instigated small but important changes in how the industry operates. Nike, for instance, was forced to release the contents of its internal review of factories, though continued to defend its manufactures and marketing practices. Similar companies have been placed on the defensive, moving from making symbolic overtures to sweatshop activists to implementing major changes. The student anti-sweatshop movement has also led to the increased exposure of corporations that profit from sweatshops and licensing of university apparel.

Cities Against Sweatshops

As students have challenged the purchasing and licensing procedures of their universities, unions, religious groups and citizen activists have began to pressure their local governments into adopting purchasing laws that keep public dollars out of the hands of businesses that profit form or use sweatshops. Using the combined purchasing power of a local government to advance the rights of workers, city purchasing ordinances has become a powerful mechanism at home to discourage sweatshops and human rights abuses abroad. The purchasing power of local governments, generally more responsive to concerns of citizens they are suppose to serve than state and federal governments, have become a new target to ensure that millions of dollars are kept from manufactures and contractors who profit from human and labor rights abuses. For example, more than two dozen cities, and the State of Massachusetts have passed Burma purchasing laws, that place restrictions on purchasing goods and services from companies that do business in the Burma (Myanmar) due to the severe human rights abuses going on there. While many companies profit from setting up shop in authoritarian and oppressive countries, citizens and consumers have asked their local governments to stop rewarding companies that profit from oppressive governments and exploitive working conditions. These laws have been enormously effective in getting many companies to stop encouraging human rights abuses by investing in Burma, but also identifying companies who fail to comply with the ordinances.

In this final case, UNITE has launched the "Cities Against Sweatshops" campaign, which is aimed at getting Union Cities to adopt procurement ordinances that keeps public dollars from going to apparel makers who use sweatshops.[10] One recent example of this, is an anti-sweatshop ordinance recently passed by the New York City Council. This case demonstrates how trade unions like UNITE have come full circle in acting strategically to advance the interests of unionized apparel workers at home while curtailing worker exploitation internationally. These locally centered actions have international effects aimed at stopping worker abuses around the world.

The global capitalist economy sends the highest rewards to the highest bidding consumer and the lowest bidding producer. This is a recipe for bringing clothing made in sweatshops to us consumers at hyper-inflated prices. A novel new approach to combating sweatshops has potential to through a small but disruptive wrench in the structure of the global economy. UNITE and other unions, who have seen their membership and power decline in the last few decades, has turned to a new approach to advancing workers rights at home and discouraging sweatshop abuses abroad. Turning their energies to the "point of consumption," labor and human rights groups have started targeting companies who profit from sweatshops, and keeping them from getting public dollars through legislation. The New York ordinance outlines three main provisions somewhat similar to provisions outlined for colleges in the WRC; one that ensures no tax dollars to corporate criminals, or apparel companies that have violated labor and safety laws. A second provision states that no public money may go to producers that pay below the poverty line for a family of four. A third provision stipulates that companies have no hidden factories and disclose the location of each of their and their subcontractors and suppliers factories. Hennefeld adds, "the ordinance will ensure that not a single police uniform, hospital linen or firefighter’s boot in New York City will be made with sweatshop labor."[11]

This ordinance was conceived and crafted by UNITE and Council Speaker Peter Vallone, but relied extensively on the support of the city employees union AFSCME, New York Labor Council and other affiliated unions to raise awareness of the sweatshop issue and encourage others to support the ordinance. UNITE also taped a coalition of City Councilors, led by Vallone, who have a record of being sensitive to human rights and labor issues.[12] On March 14, after a year of lobbying and collation building, NYC Council overwhelming passed the ordinance. On its passage, UNITE President Jay Mazur said;

This legislation sends a very clear message that the City of New York will not allow taxpayer money to be used to support sweatshops. Not only will this new law become a useful tool in the fight against sweatshops, but it also will level the playing field for responsible New York City garment manufacturers that have, for too long, been subject to unfair competition from sweatshops (Unite, 1)

In other words, companies that operate sweatshops at home or abroad are ineligible for public money from New York City. New York City government spends over 70 million dollars on apparel and textiles for police officers, firefighters and hospitals. "A sizable chunk of money lost to any company that thinks they can save a few dollars by using sweatshop labor" adds Hennefeld. Also explaining that the sweatshop ordinance is one that is so strict, with provisions for living wages and human working conditions, its suggested that only suppliers with Unite or other union contracts are the only businesses that will be eligible to supply NYC with apparel.

Compared to other measures to aimed at once again riding the planet of sweatshops, a city purchasing ordinance is one of the easiest, yet effective ways to both send a message to purveyors of sweatshops by denying public money to them, while rewarding manufactures who recognize workers rights and provide a living wage to employees. Still, there are some problematic elements of this type of campaign and some suspicious benefactors to such a purchasing arrangement. The apparel industry with UNITE or other union contracts, for obvious reasons, supported the campaign.[13] While the measure does not overtly restrict apparel from overseas, the measure’s implication is that only US suppliers stand to benefit since they are under a UNITE contract and meet the procurement ordinance’s definition of a living wage. While the spirit of the sweat free city campaign aims to limit the proliferation of sweatshops abroad, the ordinance has protectionist elements, which is different from the cross-boarder spirit of aforementioned campaigns. Though city sweatshop purchasing ordinances show great promise in curtailing corporate sweatshop abuses, UNITE and the campaign organizers must generate broader grassroots and transnational support. This campaign has flaws that could backfire because it shows evidence of labor teaming up with capital and nationalist interests. The goal of an effective campaign should not be to shut down apparel factories abroad and keep production in the US, but to guarantee sweat free working conditions everywhere. Without the backing of the broad labor, human rights and middle class alliances shown in the previous cases, the Cities Against Sweatshop Campaigns will surely fail.

Conclusion:

The political and economic climate of globalization has brought the revival of the 19th century sweatshop. History has shown that the most effective weapon against the sweatshop is in the organized strength of workers. But corporate-led globalization poses a problem for the continued feasibility of this approach. At least in the short term, workers in the hyper-exploitive export processing zones of the global South face extremely tough obstacles to sustaining independent worker organization, much less successful mass strikes. Along with the proliferation of global capitalism has been a crippling of workers abilities to demand higher wages and better working conditions at the point of production. Despite the hyper exploitive tendencies of global capitalism and mass marketing that obscure the relations of production, new opportunities have formed to challenge these arrangements. While the power and leverage at the point of production has diminished on the shop floor, new opportunities for disruption have emerged at the point of consumption. Allies at the “point of consumption,” we contend, are important fixtures for the advance of worker organization and rights globally. Like the support provided by progressive era, middle class suffragists to the mass strikes and struggles of working class immigrant women following the tragic Triangle Factory fire in 1911, today’s struggle against the sweatshop may involve a cross class alliance that is also global in scope. Overall, the movement dynamics that we have observed include an emergent strategy that combines cross border worker solidarity with a strategy of disruption aimed at the image of the corporation and its products.

Bibliography

Alexander, Robin and Gilmoer, Peter. 1994. “The Emergence of Cross-Border Labor Solidarity” NACLA Report on the Americas. 28(1) July/Aug.

Armbruster, Ralph. 1997. “Cross-Border Labor Organizing in the Garment Industry: The Struggle for Guatemala Maquiladora Workers at Phillips Van- Heusen.”

Bonacich, Edna. 2001. “The Challenge of Organizing in a Globalized/ Flexible Industry: The Case of the Apparel Industry in Los Angeles,” in Baldoz, Rick, Charles Koeber and Philip Kraft, eds., The Critical Study of Work: Labor, Technology, and Global Production. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Brooks, Ethel. 1998. “Maquilas and Sweated Girls: A Study of Transnational Protest and the Garment Industry in El Salvador.” Paper presented at the International Sociological Association.

Cassel, Douglass. 1999. “The Gap: Getting Serious About Sweatshops” Worldview Commentary No. 82. Northwestern University School of Law.

Corporate Watch. 1999. Blood Sweat And Shears; Interviews with Charles Kernaghan.

Dreiling, Michael and Ian Robinson. 1998. “Union Responses to NAFTA in the USA and Canada: Explaining Intra- and International Variation.” Mobilization: An International Journal Vol. 3(2): 163-184.

Figueroa, Hector. 1996. “In the Name of Fashion: Exploitation in the Garment Industry” NACLA Report on the Americas. 29(4) Jan/Feb.

Frank, Dana. 1999. Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism. Beacon: NY.

Frundt, Henry. 1998. Trade Coditions and Labor Rights: U.S Initiatives, Dominican and Central America Responses

Greenhouse, Steve. 1999. Activism Surges at Campuses Nationwide, and Labor is at Issue” New York Times. March 29. A14.

Howard, Alan. 1997. “Labor, History, and Sweatshops in the New Global Economy,” in Andrew Ross, ed., No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers. New York: Verso.

Kernighan, Charles. 1997. “Made in China; Behind the Label” National Labor Committee Report. National Labor Committee.

Lasn, Kalle. 1999. Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge – and Why We Must. Quill: NY..

Lee, Louise and Bernstein, Aaron. 2000. “Who Says Student Protests Don’t Matter.” Business Week. June 12. Pg 94.

Levenson-Estrada, and Frundt, Henry. 1995. “Toward a New Internationalism: Lessons from the Guatemalan Labor Movement.” NACLA Report on the Americas. 28(5) March/April.

Moberg, David. 1999. “Students are Making Manufactures Sweat” In These Times. Pg. 20 December.

National Labor Committee. 1998. “Workers Rights in the Americas? Mandarin Factory.” Campaign Report.

Piore, Michael. 1997. “The Economics of the Sweatshop,” in Andrew Ross, ed., No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers. New York: Verso.

Ross, Andrew. 1997. “Introduction,” in Andrew Ross, ed., No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers. New York: Verso.

Sims, Beth. 1992. Workers of the World Undermined: American Labor's Role in U.S. Foreign Policy. Boston, MA: South End Press.

Spalding, Hobart A. Jr. 1988. “Unions Look South” NACLA Report on the Americas. May/June.

UNITE. 2001. “UNITE Statement Regarding Groundbreaking New York City Council Anti-Sweatshop Procurement Bill.” Press Release. March 14.

United States Department of the Interior. 1998. "Federal-CNMI Initiative on Labor, Immigration, and Law Enforcement in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Fourth Annual Report," Department of Interior Office of Insular Affairs.

US/GLEP. 1997. “Break-Through in Guatemala! Union contract signed with Phillips- Van Heusen” Labor Alerts. August.

US/LEAP. 1999. “Phllips-Van Heusen: An Industry “Leader” Unveiled” Labor Alerts. Feburary.

Brian Wolf

ABSTRACT

Methodology

Bibliography