Abstract
Strategizing Against Sweatshops: The Global Economy, Student Activism, and Worker Empowerment is an analytic examination of the strategic evolution of the U.S. anti-sweatshop movement, United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). A sociologist at Loyola University Chicago, author Matthew Williams’s primary goal is to uncover the processes of strategic decision-making and understand why movement activists make the choices they do. His book, the product of Williams’s doctoral dissertation, uses the ethnographic method and 30 in-depth interviews to reconstruct the history of the USAS.
Williams’s introduction reviews existing scholarship and sets out his approach. The author builds on previous scholarship on social movements to explore how anti-sweatshop movements develop their strategic models. To uncover how movements operate within particular social environments and identify possible points of leverage, Williams expands the understanding of political opportunity structures (POS) from a traditional focus on the state to encompass social structures, cultural factors, and non-movement social actors.
Part I contextualizes the emergence of student anti-sweatshop activism in the mid-1990s. Williams identifies two key structures: one, the international apparel industry, shaped by the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and the rise of outsourcing, and, two, U.S. college campuses, where college administrations sought to maintain legitimacy amidst growing corporatization. Understanding these structures proved essential in shaping the concrete goals, strategies, and possibilities of student activism.
Part II provides a detailed examination of the USAS’s origins, organization, and ideology. Drawing from participant accounts, Williams identifies how the USAS developed from a dispersed, localized, and often nonstrategic student anti-sweatshop movement to become the leader of a global movement coalition. Two strategic collaborations were crucial in this development. First, collaboration with UNITE, the U.S.-based national apparel union, helped activists develop coherent campaign strategies and transmitted worker empowerment as central to the success of any anti-sweatshop campaign. Joint efforts with larger social movement networks, which possessed a comprehensive knowledge of sweatshops, allowed student organizers to acquire expertise. Second, the USAS’s success was rooted in identifying links between the apparel industry and colleges and universities, which became their central point of leverage. Williams attributes the USAS’s early success to initially building their own legitimacy, followed by disruptive actions (sit-ins) aimed at provoking negotiations with college administrations. This wave of protests resulted in the adoption of stringent codes of conduct, guiding college administrations’ choice of suppliers allowed to sell licensed apparel.
In Part III, Williams explores how setbacks and new challenges faced by the USAS following their first victory resulted in strategic innovation. The first cycle of innovation happened as the USAS faced push-backs from corporate social responsibility programs and the creation of the Fair Labour Association, a corporate-led monitoring mechanism to ensure “sweat-free” apparel production. Realizing the need to offer an alternative, the USAS helped create a new independent monitoring organization, the Workers’ Rights Consortium (WRC). However, the WRC's efforts were limited, as lead companies shifted business away from factories that complied with codes of conduct. Understanding these limitations as structural, the USAS began the second cycle of innovation resulting in the creation of the Designated Suppliers Program (DSP), requiring lead companies to make long-term commitments to their suppliers in exchange for certification.
Overall, the book contributes an elaborated study on movement cycles, alternating between proven strategic models and innovative approaches. These cycles of strategic innovation also influence the ideological changes that in turn inform future actions. The ability to assess POS, find points of leverage, and strategize in innovative ways, alternating between disruption and discursive change, may prove an effective path to movement success, not only when focusing on corporations and educational institutions, like in the case of the USAS, but also when challenging nation-states.
Strategizing Against Sweatshops is a useful resource for any researcher or student interested in the dynamics of social movements as they face powerful adversaries.