The Success of Students Against Sweatshops

By Miriam Markowitz, WireTap. Posted July 9, 2002.

Since 1998, the United Students Against Sweatshops movement has battled behemoths from Nike to the Gap to Clinton's Fair Labor Association. They are working to make the world safer for garment workers and conscientious buyers everywhere. Four years later, the group's story has made its way to America's independent, anarchist, and radical bookstores (and even to Barnes and Noble) in the new book "Students Against Sweatshops". The book, which partners USAS with Nation correspondent and veteran activist Liza Featherstone, is part history, part propaganda and all careful critical analysis of how students are fighting corrupt corporatism and even (gasp!) capitalism. With the detail of a how-to manual and the pace of a thriller, Featherstone uses the voices of her protagonists to lift "Students Against Sweatshops" from the level of dry documentary into a class of its own. WireTap talked with her over email.

WireTap: Why did you write "Student Against Sweatshops"?

LF: I had been writing about youth activism, and about labor issues, for a number of years. So when the Nation magazine asked me to start writing about anti-sweatshop and related campus campaigns, I was delighted. USAS had already begun work on a book; Colin Robinson (then-publisher of Verso) saw my Nation work and suggested we collaborate. Since USAS and I already had a friendly relationship, we agreed.

Do you have a personal history of activism?

Yes. I started as an anti-nuclear activist early in college (this was the late 1980s), and then got involved with the campus PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) which worked mostly on environmental issues. I still think all those issues are extremely important (maybe now more than ever), but I became a lot more interested in how human beings can figure out how to live together on this planet -- in gender, racial and economic terms. [I also became interested] in confronting the destructive power of capital, something that wasn't much talked about at that point, even by most progressive activists.

I became pretty active in feminist and "diversity" (early 1990s buzzword) work on campus, as well as protesting the Gulf War, and moves by the university to arm campus security guards with guns, which were strenuously resisted by a great coalition of students of color, anti-authoritarian hippies and peaceniks. I was also very involved in the administration of our student housing cooperatives -- they were the best places to find people interested in more egalitarian forms of economic organization.

In "SAS", you mention that if predominantly white, middle class activists manage to build coalitions with minority and lower class groups then "shit will really go down." However, you don't seem confident that this will occur. What can activists do to build such bridges and to broaden the movement as a whole?

I think this happens when privileged activists are willing to actively support the work of activists who have less power. For example, middle-class white people have been working in solidarity with immigrants who are fighting the government's racist crackdown, which includes detentions, privacy violations and restricted access to education.

I have sometimes heard the anti-corporate/anti-globalization movement referred to as a movement for global democracy. What is the difference among these terms, and which is the most useful?

Good question! I ask myself this question a lot, and I'm not sure. As my colleague, the left economic journalist Doug Henwood, is always pointing out, "anti-globalization" is a term that should probably be retired. We're always having to clarify that we're not against all kinds of globalization, just the capitalist, or corporate kind. There are a lot of good things about having an interconnected global economy -- we should probably be fighting to socialize it rather than rejecting it. "Anti-corporate" is better, but isn't quite precise enough because not all the problems that concern our movement are caused by corporations; corporations are just one of many ways that the rich, under capitalism, maintain power. I like the "movement for global democracy," I think it's very accurate, but I worry that to people who aren't in the activist loop, it's not clear enough that we're talking about our economic system. I do kind of like the term "global economic justice movement."

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