Sweatfree Tribe

Until recently, Sarah Leiber Church has been the Program Director for the Progressive Jewish Alliance's (PJA) Bay Area Office. In her six years with PJA, Sarah was deeply engaged in interfaith and coalition work on core social and economic justice campaigns such as "Hotel Workers Rising," and "No on 8." She also sits on the advisory board of Sweatfree Communities. In the fall, she begins studies at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service.

Ethix Merch: From where you sit, how is the anti-sweatshop movement faring? Does anti-sweatshop work still have a prominent place on the national progressive agenda?

Sarah Leiber Church:

Even as we all reel from economic woes, the US media skewers unions, and the negative impacts of corporate globalization are more and more apparent, anti-sweatshop work has become a bright spot of constructive, cross-sector solutions with a few main initiatives that build tangible alternatives, and have sparked grassroots support across the country.

A few examples: Sweatfree government procurement, championed by the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium, has brought together cities & states to leverage tax dollars to support fair workplaces. The Designated Suppliers Program is the latest innovation being built by United Students Against Sweatshops to support labor-rights-compliant factories. And the economic moment has galvanized conscious consumerism that has picked up the speed of fair trade and union-made products.

Ethix Merch:  What motivates the American Jewish community more, when it comes to sweatfree activism and consumerism -- biblical teachings or the Jewish experience as victims of sweatshops? What more can be done to increase the Jewish community's involvement in the work?

Sarah Leiber Church: 

There's a saying I love - "2 Jews, 3 Opinions" - that always makes me wary of naming communal motivations. Even what binds us together into a community is a blend of many motivating factors - faith, ethnicity, history, culture. On the one hand, while teaching Jews about labor rights and sweatshops for the past 6 years, I must admit I have felt more "aha" moments when I invoke the Eastern-European Jewish immigrant experience than when I invoke Torah. For many American Jews today (especially the majority which does not follow halacha, or Jewish law), historical moments like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire evoke sympathy and outrage, while Deuteronomy may be more of a theoretical exercise. On the other hand, when presented with a text, those I've worked with tend to somewhat accept its implicit merit, and even if they challenge it they'll re-interpret or play with the text, finding ways they agree. This willingness to engage is incredibly powerful for our work, because the texts are so clearly supportive of rights for workers.

Whether its source is biblical or historical, therefore, an internal moral compass points the vast majority of Jews I've encountered towards deep support of workers' rights. The challenge is then not to change minds, but to activate them. Two essential ingredients for this task - a personal connection and a feasible, prompt way to take action. Since we all wear clothes, most of us have worked a job, and Jews have the historical and/or biblical connection, the former only needs to have attention called to it. To accomplish the latter, we must find ways to brings Jews together to support labor rights, and have ready-made, meaningful ways that Jewish groups like synagogues, or individuals, can get involved.

Ethix Merch: As someone who has done both paid and unpaid activist work for a long time, do you find one to be more effective than the other? In other words, when activists are paid for their work, does something important get lost?

Sarah Leiber Church: 

Personally, with my limited energy and time, I want to maximize my impact by making the work of my heart also the work that allows me to sustain myself. This has, for me, led to opportunities that cleave closely to personal priorities, but that's always something to watch - is the focus of your work shifting due to what is "fundable," and how will you reconcile or address that? It's important to keep evaluating whether the intent and process of your work, as well as your role in it, is still work you deem deeply important and effective. That's a main thing that can get lost with professional change work.

Ethix Merch: What do you hope to accomplish during your time at NYU's Wagner School?

Sarah Leiber Church: 

I'm very much looking forward to playing with new ideas about how change can be made. I'm particularly interested in innovative cross-sector collaborations, towards labor rights and in other arenas - food, economic development, etc. And I plan to "nerd out" on organizational management theory, specifically as it relates to partnerships - which can form the foundation of effective, well-connected movements.

Ethix Merch: Looking back on your six years with Progressive Jewish Alliance, what is one of your proudest accomplishments?

Sarah Leiber Church: 

I wouldn't quite call it an accomplishment of mine, but what makes me proudest about my work is the passion and skill of new generations (young and young-at-heart) of organizers coming up through PJA's ranks. These are folks who have re-found Judaism, or re-found social justice work, or who know our community so deeply that they can see possibilities for impactful changemaking that even long-time leaders cannot see. Having been a part of building the container for such a vibrant community - it makes me so hopeful.

A recent Cornell University graduate, Jordan Wells is the Sweatfree Coordinator with the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition, an organization that was instrumental in one of the biggest news events of 2009 for the sweatfree movement- New York State's decision to join the national Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium.

Ethix Merch: The anti-sweatshop movement is at an exciting juncture. The Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium-- a joint effort among cities and states to support the emergence of truly sweatfree factories--is moving forward. Can you briefly describe the process of how you and your colleagues persuaded the State of New York to become the eighth official member of the consortium?

Jordan Wells:

It helps to be on the right side of a given policy issue. As long as Nicholas Kristof (who continually presents the false sweatshops-or-nothing dichotomy) doesn't hold elective office in New York State, I think we'll be in good shape there.

But being right is only the start. We  also needed the impetus for the state to take action (i.e. Why now?). The impetus sprang from SweatFree Communities' "Subsidizing Sweatshops" reports and the accompanying media coverage, which clearly linked New York apparel purchases (and therefore tax dollars) with sweatshops around the world.

To ensure that the state would follow through, we employed alliances with the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), UNITE HERE (later Workers United), and other labor and faith organizations. Also, we patiently and exhaustively explained and re-explained what a sweatfree code of conduct and membership in the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium would mean for New York. Lastly, we mostly cooperated with the procedure and timeline offered by the state, while still avoiding compromising sweatfree principles.

Ethix Merch:  What does it mean to you personally to have played such a big part in the victory?

Jordan Wells: 

I am very pleased to have had the opportunity of helping build toward this victory. It is gratifying to hear from other sweatfree campaigns that this will help spur their city/state decision-makers along.

Ethix Merch: Your organization, the Labor-Religion Coalition of New York State, is one of many faith-based groups deeply engaged in anti-sweatshop work. For you, what's the connection between religion and sweatshops?

Jordan Wells: 

Faith communities have and will always have a responsibility to bear witness both to the injustices present in our every day and to exploitation hidden from view. While much of civil society takes a fatalistic posture toward sweatshops--accepting them as the inevitable result of globalization and development--the religious recognize abuse of workers as a moral failing that we can and must correct.

Ethix Merch: As a fairly recent college graduate, do you have a sense that sweatshops are an urgent and important issue on campuses? Are students basically familiar with the problem?

Jordan Wells: 

It depends on the campus, among other factors.  My sense is that students are more familiar with this issue than their predecessors, but that familiarity sometimes may lead to a strange complacency. As tuition rises across the nation, student loans become unsustainably burdensome, and job opportunities decline, I think issues closer to home will be foremost on students' minds; thoughtful analysis would show that these problems and sweatshop labor have several root causes in common.

Ethix Merch: Please tell us a little bit about your work with Justice for Farmworkers. What should our readers know?

Jordan Wells: 

The Justice for Famworkers Campaign seeks the removal of the legal exclusions that have denied generations of New York farmworkers the basic rights and protections enjoyed by other workers, including the right to overtime pay, a weekly day of rest, collective bargaining protections, and coverage under the state's temporary disability insurance program. These shameful exclusions are rooted in a Jim Crow-era compromise, in which Dixiecrats prevailed upon Congress to exempt farm and domestic workers (both primarily African American workforces) from coverage under the New Deal labor laws; the southerners' explicitly stated purpose was to prevent black workers from being put on an equal footing with their white counterparts.  Seventy-five years later, New York's mostly Latino farmworker population continues to toil without basic rights and protections.

The Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act, currently pending before the legislature, would deliver major advances in farmworker rights. For more information, check out (and join!) our Facebook group http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10396950549.

Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program, at Occidental College. He is coauthor of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City. He writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Huffington Post, and American Prospect. From 1984-92 he served as senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray Flynn. He is chair of the Horizon Institute, an LA-based think tank. He also serves on the boards of several organizations, including the LA Alliance for a New Economy , the Liberty Hill Foundation, the National Housing Institute, and the Southern CA Assn for Nonprofit Housing.

Ethix Merch: To follow up on your article in The Nation about the dispute between Workers United and UNITE HERE... what have you learned about the state of garment-factory organizing? Since the merger, UNITE-HERE seemed to have stopped organizing garment factories, but now that Workers United has broken off, they’ve organized workers from the old Eagle Factory in New Bedford, MA.

Do you believe that there is a future for the garment industry in the United States, and are you excited about Workers United organizing more garment factories here?

Peter Dreier:

The garment industry’s heyday was in the middle and early part of the twentieth century in the United States. Beginning in the fifties and sixties and accelerating in the seventies, our industry began to move first to the anti-union south and then overseas, in part because it’s such a labor intensive industry…And so we’ve seen a dramatic, overwhelming decline in the number of garment and textile workers in the United States, and I don’t see any sign that that’s going to reverse itself.

The nature of the garment industry in the United States is that the factories and sewing shops are relatively small, with a few exceptions like American Apparel in Los Angeles. Most are subcontractors that employ ten or a hundred people, often undocumented immigrants. The truth is that enforcement of labor and hour laws means that the subcontractors close up shop and move somewhere else under a different name.

Although there may be pockets of union success in the next decade or so, I don’t think that’s where Workers United will see its growth. Its growth will be in industrial laundries and other sectors.

Ethix Merch:  In June, you wrote an article for The Huffington Post about the large-scale effort to boycott the Russell Corporation. In the article you mentioned the possibility of NBA players getting involved in the dispute over the ethical implications of their uniforms. Has any progress been made on this front since your article? How is the USAS campaign going?

Peter Dreier: 

I wrote an article in The Nation called “Where are the Jocks for Justice?” It’s extremely disappointing that athletes, whether they come from poor areas or middle class families, are in a bubble world where it’s hard for them to break out and get involved in social activism. Every once-in-a-while you hear about people like Carlos Delgado and Adonal Foyle, but they are rare exceptions. There’s a wonderful sportswriter named David Zirin, who writes for The Nation about the link between sports and politics. He occasionally writes about examples of pro and amateur athletes taking stands on controversial social and political issues.

Unless you can get high profile athletes or the players union involved, it’s not going to happen. A few years back I was trying to get the baseball players union to take a stand on sweatshops -- for example, their baseballs are made in a sweatshop in Costa Rica, and some of their uniforms are made in sweatshops. But the players union wasn't interested. Most of the players are like spoiled brats. There are exceptions, but those players don’t control the union.

Ethix Merch: Boycotts are one of the most important tools available to workers and their allies.. Do you think that the movement uses boycotts effectively?

Peter Dreier: 

There are two dilemmas with boycotting. First, you risk taking business away from the workers you’re trying to help. Second, if the boycott isn’t well publicized, the management can intimidate workers and tell them the union is trying to take away their jobs. The only time a boycott works is if the workers themselves understand the risk and encourage their allies and consumers to do it when they think they’re at a point of their organizing campaign where a boycott or a threat of a boycott can make a difference. Cesar Chavez understood that and Marshall Ganz’s book about the United Farm Workers union ("Why David Sometimes Wins") talks about that. The boycott against the major agricultural growers in California was successful because it was a coordinated action with the union and consumers. It has to be a part of a larger strategy, and sometimes it can work.

Ethix Merch: Recently, you gave a speech about the state of the California budget. Budget deficits aren’t unique to California, of course, and low-income folks are suffering from resulting cuts in services. Increasing taxes on the wealthy to raise government revenue and protect the public safety net seems to be politically very difficult if not impossible. What do you think needs to happen to ensure that, in tough economic times like these, critical social service programs are protected?

Peter Dreier: 

The biggest obstacle to raising taxes on the rich is the political clout of rich individuals and businesses. That is always the case whenever you’re trying to do something progressive, and progressive taxation is a part of that. All politics is about organized money against organized people. (Sometimes you can have both. The NRA has both. Labor unions sometimes have both.)

The second obstacle is the mythology about what we mean by a “healthy business climate.” Whenever you say you’re going to raise taxes on the rich, big business and rich people say they’re going to move, they’ll destroy the tax base and the upper middle class will leave the city, the state, or even the country. 75 to 80 percent of the time they’re crying wolf, but sometimes they’re not. Political leaders, even Barack Obama, sometimes don’t know when they’re bluffing. If you regulate the pharmaceutical industry and reduce their profits, will they stop doing innovative research? No. But if you repeat a lie often enough people start to believe it.

A third obstacle is that when you talk about taxing the rich, middle class people think you’re talking about them. Progressive taxation and government in general has to recover from thirty years of Reaganism. We haven’t yet recovered. Obama’s victory and his ability to communicate has helped to do that, but he’s fighting an uphill fight to restore the legitimacy of government as part of the solution. For example, Obama wants to raise taxes on families earning over $350,000 to pay for his health care plan. That's less than 2% of the population. You'd think that would be a no-brainer. But even some Democrats in Congress oppose this kind of progressive taxation. Either they think (wrongly) that this will hurt the business climate, or they are just in the pockets of the rich who give them campaign contributions -- or a bit of both.

The role of progressives is to change the political climate to make it easier for Obama to be successful. Obama is doing what he can to get his legislation passed. It’s not easy. Some leftists think that Obama doesn’t have enough backbone. That’s B.S.. Basically it’s a strategic question, how do you calculate the opposition and what do you need to do to overcome it. Obama warned people, during the campaign, that it’s not going to be easy to pass health care reform, labor law reform, climate change legislation, and other bold reforms, because there are a lot of powerful forces lined up against it. Our job is to make it easier for Obama to do his job, by changing the political climate.

Julie Su is the Litigation Director at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California (APALC), an affiliate of the Washington D.C.-based Asian American Justice Center. Ms. Su was one of the leaders in fighting for the freedom of the Thai garment workers who were enslaved for years in an apartment complex in El Monte, California and served as lead counsel in a federal lawsuit against the garment manufacturers and retailers whose clothes they sewed.

Ethix Merch: The slave labor case in El Monte, California is probably the most notorious example of sweatshop abuse in modern American history. (Allow us to be the latest in a long line of people to thank you for the amazing work you did to help free the victims.) Are there more recent examples that anti-sweatshop advocates should have at their fingertips when discussing the continued existence of sweatshops in the United States?

Julie Su:

Unfortunately, sweatshops in the United States remain a reality in many industries, including the garment industry.  Today, Los Angeles is the sweatshop capital of the U.S., where garment workers sew for long hours, often without meal and rest breaks and often for less than the minimum wage.  They almost invariably work overtime but these hours are not reflected in the time cards of the factory or in the pay workers receive.  The U.S. Department of Labor's last study about this was nearly 10 years ago but at that time, over 60% of Los Angeles factories were found to violate basic wage and hour protections for workers.  Over 90% were found to have health and safety violations detrimental to workers' well-being.  These statistics are unacceptable and they demonstrate that sweatshops are not aberrations in an otherwise lawful industry.  They are a way of doing business.

 

Even during the El Monte case, I was afraid that the horrific conditions endured by the Thai garment workers would set a new low, would make the routine sweatshop conditions seem tame by comparison and therefore, would make it harder to push for higher standards in the industry as a whole.  People would say, "maybe the conditions aren't perfect but at least the workers aren't held behind barbed wire as they were in El Monte." After the El Monte case, we at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, working together with our allies, brought a number of cases involving such sweatshop conditions.  We represented immigrant Asian and Latino workers against companies including bebe, BCBG, and XOXO using the same theory, that manufacturers and retailers at the top of the garment industry food chain are responsible for the conditions in which their clothes are made.  We represented a group of Latino workers who sewed jackets, including university apparel, right here in L.A. and we drew strength from the fabulous student movement that has grown up to leverage university power to demand decent working conditions.  Perhaps the most publicized case was the one in which we represented Latino garment workers against Forever 21. These workers labored in different factories but all were paid less than their lawful wages and endured terrible verbal abuse and inhumanely long hours.  The workers launched a 3-year campaign against Forever 21, which was covered in the Emmy-award winning documentary, "Made in L.A."   Finally, a few years after El Monte, several nonprofit workers' rights organizations sued over a dozen manufacturers and retailers producing garments in the U.S. territory of Saipan. Those garments were sold with "Made in the U.S.A." labels but the workers, mostly from China and the Phillippines, were forced to live, sleep, eat and work in abject poverty without any of the federal labor law protections that exist in other parts of the U.S.

I think it's critically important to know that the fight against sweatshops in Los Angeles and in the U.S. did not begin and end with El Monte.  But El Monte lit a fire and exposed the standard practices of the industry -- and the dangers when we look the other way and pretend they don't exist -- in a way that galvanized the anti-sweatshop movement.  Incidentally, there is happy news to report for the El Monte workers, the majority of whom became U.S. citizens last year (2008).  It was an incredible moment in their long and often very difficult journey toward achieving the dreams that brought them to the United States in the first place.

Ethix Merch: After all these years, do you think most people understand that sweatshops still exist in the United States? If not, why hasn’t the message sunk in?

Julie Su:

I definitely think people are more aware of sweatshops in the U.S. than they were, say, 15 years ago.  When I started this work in 1994, the campaign against Jessica McClintock, led by the brave Chinese workers from Oakland and the Oakland-based Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) and the Los Angeles-based Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), was in full swing.  Activists, workers,  and students regularly picketed outside of the Jessica McClintock boutique at the corner of Wilshire and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and when people saw them, or took the flyers about the campaign, I often heard them say, "What sweatshops? Not here."  It is harder to claim total ignorance about the existence of sweatshops in our backyard.

 

But at the same time, I think there has been some anti-sweatshop fatigue both by the public and the media.  There was a tremendous amount of attention in the 1990s, spurred by the horror of the El Monte case and the courage of the Thai and Latino workers in that case who refused to be silent.  Soon after that, there were exposes about Kathie Lee Gifford and Disney and the conditions in which their clothes were made overseas.  And federal and state governments felt they had to do something, but the reality is that this type of change requires a fundamental challenge to the industry itself, not just fixes at the margins and window dressing.  It is not enough to enforce existing minimum wage and overtime laws without looking at the fundamental reason why sweatshops exist, which is the power exerted by corporations at the top for the cheapest labor possible and the corresponding lack of power by workers at the bottom to protect themselves. 

Shifting this balance of power, making it more equitable, more just, is difficult and faces intense resistance by those who profit from things the way they are. Some of this resistance is more institutional, like the media coverage about business and what is good for business vs. labor and what is good for workers.  It's hard to get sustained public attention to sweatshops.  Even in our cases, we started to see the media ask, "Ok, so it's another sweatshop case, what is the new angle on this story?"  Some of this relates to consumer habits, people are really devoted to fashion and if there isn't a quick answer to where they can get sweatshop-free clothes they like at prices they can afford, they'll tend to still buy whatever is available. The change needed to really eliminate sweatshop conditions requires sustained, focused efforts and resources which simply aren't there.   So while workers, activists, unions, community-based organizers and nonprofit organizations continue to do this work, the public often doesn't hear about it.

Ethix Merch: From an economic standpoint, how is the struggle of garment workers in the United States connected to that of foreign garment workers? 

Julie Su: 

The struggle for justice for garment workers in the U.S. is intimately tied to justice worldwide for workers.  Most obviously, the threat that manufacturers and retailers have always made is that if U.S. workers stand up for themselves, organize, and improve working conditions, the companies will simply ship their work to countries with even more vulnerable workers and even fewer labor law protections.  It's really quite cynical and, I think, appalling, but it is a real option for corporations in the garment industry and we saw this in the years immediately before and after the sunset of the Multi-Fibre Agreement, which made it even easier for companies to seek out the cheapest labor anywhere in the world.  It led to a significant (though by no means complete) decrease in garment production in the U.S. 

So it is essential for working conditions everywhere to be improved to eliminate the competitive advantage that companies find by producing elsewhere.  This doesn't mean that every worker has to be paid the same wage, but it does mean that there should be living wage standards across the globe that ensure that someone who works in a garment factory can make enough to live, to eat, to have shelter, education, health, and some leisure. 

From a justice perspective, it is obvious that the crushing poverty faced by so many workers who sew garments violates our most basic notions of human rights.  We cannot pay attention to one group of workers in one country without understanding the interconnectedness of all the workers on whose backs billions of dollars in clothing are sold each year.

Ethix Merch: Why did Sweatshop Watch, the organization you co-founded, close its doors? Who is stepping in to do the work that was being done by SW?

Julie Su: 

Sweatshop Watch closed our doors after an amazing 15-year history of fighting with and for garment workers in the U.S. and aorund the world.  We started as a coalition of groups across the state working on anti-sweatshop efforts in the garment industry, and together, we helped pass the strongest anti-sweatshop legislation in the country, California's AB 633 (which has had multiple problems with implementation, but has also allowed hundreds of garment workers to access a speedier process of winning wages through the state labor commissioner and has also been the model for legislation in other low wage industries, such as the car wash industry). 

What we found in the last few years is that the garment industry in California has changed.  Production that used to be in the Bay Area has all but left, so many of our coalition partners were no longer working in the garment industry.  In this economy, funding was a challenge.  We realized that it made sense to go back to the roots of why we started Sweatshop Watch in the first place, which was to support the organizing and advocacy efforts of garment workers in the U.S., and this work would have to happen in Los Angeles.  We decided that using limited resources to sustain a statewide coalition didn't make sense, but everyone involved in Sweatshop Watch remains very committed to having the work carried on by APALC.

Ethix Merch: Can you tell us a little bit more about the work that APALC is currently doing?

Julie Su: 

Over the last few years, APALC has been trying to do more research on the state of the local garment industry.  There have been many changes, including, for example, the distribution of work by a single manufacturer across many different contractors (we believe this is in part a response to our lawsuits which demonstrated that if one factory was completely dependent on a single manufacturer, this helped prove that the manufacturer exercised control over working conditions in that factory and helped establish liability of the manufacturer).  We have also been very interested, particluarly in the last 2 years, in identifying companies who want to partner with us in raising standards in the garment industry and actively working to combat sweatshops.  We have also reached out to City officials to try and launch a "Made in L.A." marketing campaign that would harness the power of Los Angeles production -- there are strong reasons production has decreased everywhere else in the country but the L.A. industry remains vibrant. 

The Obama administration has taken some nice first steps toward a more worker-friendly vision of global trade. New free trade agreements pushed by the Bush Administration, such as those with Colombia and South Korea, are apparently getting some deep re-thinking – or at least, being put on the back burner while the new Administration sorts out climate change, health care and domestic trade union rights. And refreshingly, on July 16, the new United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk announced a more proactive strategy to enforce labor provisions in existing free trade agreements. Here’s what’s new under the sun.

First, a bit of explanation about what he’s talking about. Existing free trade agreements from NAFTA on through the most recent deals require our trade partners- at least on paper- to enforce their labor laws and to try to live up to international labor standards.  So what’s so striking about USTR Kirk saying that the Administration wants to make sure existing language in our trade deals is enforced?

In truth, no prior administration has ever sought to actually take the initiative when it comes to these provisions. Instead, we have assumed that of course all our trade partners are enforcing labor rights protections- except when someone points out they aren’t. In other words, enforcement of these provisions has been carried out largely on a complaint-driven basis. This model can’t really work, as the people who are most affected- the most exploited workers in the countries with which we trade- just don’t have practical means to access the mechanisms that have been set up for filing complaints. Thus, not surprisingly, very few complaints get filed, no matter how many abuses actually occur. Even when complaints do get filed- for instance, my organization, ILRF, filed about a dozen cases on behalf of Mexican workers in the early years of NAFTA- those cases take years to resolve, and workers see little return for the effort of engaging in the process.

But there is no downside to the US Trade Representative taking a new look at how we enforce these deals- and, we hope, finding a better way to do it. Real enforcement of the labor provisions in trade deals would be a win-win for both US workers and workers overseas.  Promoting policies that protect workers in other countries makes good sense for the US, economically.  Creating decent and sustainable jobs that raise developing country workers into the middle class is a win-win for workers and businesses, as it expands markets for US and global products. That has long been the main moral argument for more global trade- although few have cared to deal with the ugly reality that many workers in export industries in these countries have been getting sweatshop jobs, not decent jobs, and have not been able, in their lifetimes, to afford the goods they are producing.

Poor working conditions in developing nations not only strip laborers in those countries of their rights, but also create unfair competition in the global labor market. This global "race to the bottom" leads to degradation of conditions, to the increase in ‘sweatshop jobs,’ here at home. We need to bring up the bottom for everyone.

It’s great that USTR Kirk wants to hold trading partners accountable for labor rights, and would be even better if the new Administration sought ways to hold investors- the multinational companies that chase cheap labor around the globe- accountable as well. This would get us past the current ‘free trade’ model to one of what we might call fair trade. For example, we should be supporting terms of trade requiring that investors who benefit from trade deals agree to a floor of decent wages and working conditions that ultimately enable workers to lift themselves out of poverty, and should reward governments that institute laws and policies to regulate ‘footloose’ investors and require companies to make long-term commitments to investments- and their workforce- in developing countries. This is in all of our long term interests.

Bama Athreya is the Executive Director of the International Labor Rights Forum.

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SweatFree Communities is the leading anti-sweatshop organization in the United States. Their Executive Director, Bjorn Claeson, answered some of our questions about the state of the movement, nearly halfway through 2009.

Ethix Merch: What has been the single most important development in the fight against sweatshops in the past year?

Bjorn Claeson:

Well, I would like to say it’s been the development of the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium because it creates a substantial market for decent working conditions as well as an effective tool for workers to enforce their rights. But, the Consortium is not yet far enough along to qualify as “the most important development in the fight against sweatshops.” (Ten cities and states have committed to join so far and with a little bit of luck it will start doing monitoring work within the year).

Considering the question through U.S. lenses I would have to say that the campaign against Russell has broken new ground as scores of universities have cut their contracts with Russell in the face of overwhelming evidence that it shut down a factory in Honduras rather than recognizing workers’ choice to have a union represent them. This campaign has certainly been the most visible anti-sweatshop campaign in the United States over the past year. I am somewhat reluctant to say this protest campaign has been “the most important” because I think we ought to be able to implement positive solutions of equal magnitude. However, the Russell campaign has succeeded in something very important: building consensus that cutting and running from workers who are organizing a union is unacceptable behavior. We can build on that.

Ethix Merch: In recent years, the movement has focused on utilizing the leverage of large consumers like states, cities, universities, and school districts. While these projects develop, how can individuals help the cause?

In a related question, do you think it is realistic for consumers to buy only guaranteed sweatshop-free clothing for themselves and their children, or should they focus on supporting the movement in other ways?

Bjorn Claeson:

First of all, most of us – and I include myself here – should buy less of everything, period. When we do buy, we owe it to workers, to the earth, and to our future generations to pay a fair price so that others do not need to absorb the true cost of production by living in abject poverty, working when sick, and enduring unhealthy workplaces. Unfortunately, we have built a global economic system that requires producers to externalizing the cost of production to the weakest and most vulnerable among us, including our planet. So it is not easy to pay a fair price. We have to work against the system. Just as companies scour the globe for the cheapest possible labor, we have to scour the aisles—so to speak—for products that are union made or made by worker-owned cooperatives. We should buy organic-certified cotton as much as possible. We should consider buying products that are made locally and haven’t been transported half-way across the globe before we get them. We need to reduce the distance between consumer and producer both geographically and economically. Look at it that way and shopping is activism. We have a tool to promote shopping as activism—the Shop with a Conscience Consumer Guide. There are many other tools. The important step is to think when we buy. Is this purchase necessary? And if so, how does it impact the earth and the workers?
 

Beyond shopping? Yes, of course. There are many, many ways for people to get involved and strengthen the anti-sweatshop movement. I would suggest that people consider ways to build activism into their daily lives. How can you educate the members of your church or school? Can you get your company to buy logo-apparel made by union workers? Can you join or start a group for your city to buy only sweatshop-free apparel? There is no end of possibilities.

Ethix Merch: In a recent column, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times defended sweatshops, writing:

"Among people who work in development, many strongly believe (but few dare say very loudly) that one of the best hopes for the poorest countries would be to build their manufacturing industries. But global campaigns against sweatshops make that less likely."

How would you respond to this particular argument?

Bjorn Claeson: 

Kristof assumes that industrial development ineluctably leads to a better standard of living, that second generation factory workers will be better off than first generation workers. But he ignores the economic system within which industry develops, a system based on low-cost production requiring factories to operate as sweatshops in order to be successful. Garment factories in Central America or Asia are every bit as oppressive today as two decades ago. The anti-sweatshop movement is not trying to deny the opportunity of industrial development to certain countries—it has never been a boycott movement. Instead, it is working to change the system of production so that factories that pay workers a living wage and respect workers’ right to organize are favored rather than disfavored, so that industrial development can actually produce a middle class.

Ethix Merch: How would you rate the Obama administration’s first few months, when it comes to sweatshops? Going forward, are you optimistic about the role of the U.S. government in combating sweatshops here and abroad?

Bjorn Claeson: 

I am not in a position to rate Obama’s actions on sweatshops just yet, but here is at least a beginning of an agenda I would propose to the administration: 1) Speak out in support of unions and the Employee Free Choice Act. With EFCA workers have a better chance to turn U.S. sweatshops into decent places to work. 2) Fully fund the U.S. Department of Labor workplace investigations to discover and remedy violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. 3) Turn the ship of trade around. No more WTO and NAFTA model trade agreements in which labor standards are at best unenforceable and at worst seen as a hidden obstacle to trade. Advocate for the T.R.A.D.E. Act. 4) Enforce and then expand Clinton’s Executive Order banning federal purchases of products made by forced and indentured child labor. First, add transparency requirements and add investigatory capacity. Then expand the purchasing ban to products not made in accordance with international core labor standards. 5) Fund the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium to help all government agencies end purchasing from sweatshops.

Let’s check back in a year from now.

Ethix Merch: As challenging as it has been to pass sweat-free procurement ordinances in states and cities around the country, it seems that enforcement of these ordinances has been inconsistent. Why aren’t more of these ordinances enforced, and what is being done about it?

Bjorn Claeson: 

Enforcement is a tremendous challenge because there is hardly any supply of sweatfree uniforms and other apparel for government agencies to buy. Buying sweatfree is not the same as buying recycled paper, fair trade coffee, or organic cotton shirts when you can just check the label and buy accordingly. Buying sweatfree is a process of transformation where government agencies use their purchasing power to create transparency, investigate working conditions, demand change, and, eventually, designate sweatfree suppliers. It’s a lot of hard work in the early stages especially. The only way forward is collaborative. That is why we are focusing on creating the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium to give governments real monitoring and investigative capacity. We also encourage companies like Ethix that truly seek to comply with sweatfree standards to get into the government procurement market. It’s not going to be easy in the beginning, but we need to show government purchasers that they do have options.

Ethix Merch: During the sweatfree communities conference in 2007, a link was drawn between sweatshops in the garment industry and "sweatshops in the field." Are partnerships continuing between SFC and organizations like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers?

Bjorn Claeson: 

You know, not as much as I would like. We learned a lot from the CIW and their demands for supply chain transparency and fair pricing—their penny more per pound campaign. The solutions for sweatshop workers in the field and in the factories are similar. But whether it is because of lack of resources or other reasons we have not maintained more than occasional contact.

The Ethix Merch Blog is launching what will be a regular feature: interviews with the leading authorities in the fields of ethical business, the labor movement, and the environmental movement.

Our first interview is with Robert J.S. Ross, Ph.D., one of the country's best known scholars on sweatshops in the United States and author of Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops.

In your book Slaves to Fashion you spoke of three pillars of decency that determine working class conditions. In a few sentences, how have each of these pillars evolved since you wrote your book?

Robert Ross: The first pillar is labor unions. Labor unions in the U.S. continue to lose ground in the private sector; BUT have been highly activated during the 2008 election and are now, for the first time in many years, within sight of important labor law reform. The proposal is called the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). This is the most strategically important moment for labor in just about thirty years (i.e. since they lost labor law reform during the Carter Administration.) It will be immensely difficult, and I am personally worried that the President’s team is not willing to go all out on it. The opposition has pulled out all stops and is making crazy end-of-the-world claims about its passage.

The second pillar is middle class reformers. At the peak levels (e.g. Washington think tanks and left liberal magazines), the importance of EFCA is recognized. But the communication of this urgency to grass roots, middle class Obama supporters has not yet hit. There thus remains the difference between this era and the turn of the 19-20th century: then the "social question" and the rights of labor were at the forefront for reformers. Now it takes its place lower down on the laundry list. However, health care -- shared concern of many classes -- is consensually at the top. That's good, except that the new administration has accepted the limits of the Beltway Consensus against single payer, and thus is on the brink of muddling through another confusing reform that will not control cost nor simplify access. It will predictably decrease the number of uninsured.

The third pillar is government regulation. We now have a democratic government and open-minded partially liberal President. Already he has agreed to hire more investigators in the Dept of Labor and named a workers' champion for the Department of Labor; that's good. I'm cautiously optimistic.

On an individual level, why should U.S. consumers feel good about supporting Union Made in USA products, if that means taking away business from workers living hand to mouth in developing nations?

RR: In the first instance, our industry is now so small, it supplies only about 10% of demand. So there is surely a lot of upwards room before there is an important dent on worldwide employment.

In addition, this is an ethical matter about which I do have a view, though not a widely articulated one among professors who claim to be globally oriented. I think I owe some allegiance to the society and community from which I have sprung. If American consumers of conscience don't care about American workers, who will? I once sat on a panel between a sewing machine operator working in New York City, from El Salvador, and another woman, same job, in El Salvador. I can't find an ethical standard that would privilege one side or the other; but I can think of a political strategy that has more efficacy where I live than elsewhere.

Finally, what I really want to see is a regulated international trade regime that guarantees workers' rights -- to organize, etc., and to living wages. Let retailers and manufacturers come into the U.S. market with union-made goods from other countries and compete with union-made goods here. That is what Adam Nieman does in his product mix. That would drive labor standards up worldwide. Similarly, the Cambodians are trying to make good labor standards their national brand: and they have lost almost no market share to China in the big Asian surge after the expiration of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) quotas.

So, bottom line: buying union is good for U.S. workers; and if others come into the market competing with union made goods from elsewhere it will be good for those workers too.

Let’s indulge in a fantasy for a moment. If the movement succeeds and U.S. sweatshops are relegated to history, will the price of goods go up? Will corporate profits go down? Will the U.S. garment industry completely disappear?

RR: A union goods dominated market WOULD increase prices. They are too low. They are declining portions of family budgets and have increased MUCH less than the cost of living. Studies show we have more (cheap) clothes (and shoes) in our closets than ever before. In 1933, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins said: "The red silk bargain dress in the shop window is a danger signal. It is a warning of the return of the sweatshop, a challenge to us all to reinforce the gains we have made in our long and difficult progress toward a civilized industrial order." Well, the bargain that is too good to be true is not so good for workers -- and includes fifteen dollar jeans. I have been calculating the cost of imported clothes (now about 90% of all clothing bought.) The price is declining over the last decade for which I have calculations. Mind you, I don’t go out personally trying to pay more in the Department Store. But the fact is we'd probably do better with "fewer but better" clothes in our drawers and closets.

How realistic is a regulated international trade regime? Are you optimistic that it will happen eventually? How soon?

RR: Drastic revision of the WTO or of NAFTA/CAFTA etc. is not likely soon. Requiring Dems in three branches, it still won’t happen in this four-year cycle because this President seems to still be in the "liberal globalist" camp -- not so different from Bill Clinton. However, I could imagine a) a social democratic led EU teaming with labor governments in South America and a few Asian allies b) getting a Democratic president to allow change in WTO. This requires imagining, however, a way of neutralizing China-India or some drastic change in their political dynamics. I don't have a story line that takes me there in an imaginable near term.

Do you think it is possible that President Obama is "biding his time" on labor issues, using less controversial achievements of his initial term to increase Democratic party representation in congress?

RR: "Possible" is a big word. Lots of things are... However, clearly labor forces are making the push for EFCA now -- their calculations are that now is the time. Presidents do not usually gain, and usually lose Congressional seats at mid-term. By 2012 who knows? I might even be a grandfather by then! The imponderables for the conditions of a second term are beyond such calculation. I can think of few of FDR's major legislative accomplishments that were not in the first term. One indeed was the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) -- but this was a replacement for and foreshadowed by the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) declared unconsituational during the second term. I do not think the President is "biding his time." I think he (and perhaps more importantly, his Beltway imprisoned advisers like Rahm Emmanuel) either thinks he can't win the whole thing or doesn't care to spend the political capital it takes to get it. Our job is to be the wind that pushes the politicians to do the right thing.
 

How did you or your organization become interested in sweatshop free merchandise? What are the most important ethical criteria for you - Union Made, USA Made, Fair Trade, Eco-Friendly, or something else - and why? 

This is a place for you to share your story and browse through those submitted by some of our other clients and friends in the sweatshop free movement.

We like using the world "tribe" as a metaphor, because of what it evokes - people united around a common goal (namely, to survive and thrive), and taking on different but equally-important roles in order to accomplish that goal. 

Ethix Merch belongs to a tribe of people and organizations working to build a sweatshop free and environmentally sustainable world. The tribe includes activists, non-profit organizations, student groups, religious groups, elected officials, consumers, and businesses. Each of these subsets of the tribe approaches the collective goal from a slightly different angle, and deserves support and solidarity from the rest.