Students Against Sweatshops by Liza Featherstone

Few movements have impacted mass social change since the Vietnam War protests, but Liza Featherstone's book Students Against Sweatshops captures something close. There are times when student activism can leave the "activist" confused about the ideology they've stepped into. In a world where everything is connected, the confluence of global poverty, war, corporate abuse and women's rights often find the same ocean of activism energy. There has been development in refocusing campus campaigns, but student activism can still be an overwhelming sea of misdirected force.

On the frontline of anti-globalization the distrust of corporate power has seen everything from peaceful boycotts to the fury of World Trade Organization riots. Unless a student, worked up in desire to be part of something, is fully entrenched in the movement, there is a bombardment of questioning and doubt. What kind of corporations do I mistrust? Are they all really that bad? Does this mean the bigger they are the more harm inflicted on society?

This is where United Students Against Sweatshops took shape and a generation faced with the 21st century found their own path in activism. The Labor movement had opened the door in the early 1990s exposing the fact that sweatshops were not a throw back to the Industrial Revolution. Before that the immigrant women workers victoriously put the New York and Los Angeles garment districts to shame, though under the radar. Student activists capitalized on the media generated by labor activists Jeff Ballinger of the International Labor Organization and his revelations of Nike in Indonesia, as well as Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee and his uncloaking of Wal-Mart in Honduras.

The floodgates had opened and out poured warehouses of overpriced fashion threaded by bonded labor. It hit home for students when campus organizing at Duke University and University of Wisconsin at Madison, among others, discovered sweatshop labor was used in manufacturing apparel toting the college logo. This is where USAS found a weak spot in the distrust of corporate globalization; students internalized the fight by recognizing the clothes on their back had consequences half way around the world. Though Featherstone's book makes no exception to the sometimes vague and ambiguous stance of Anti-Sweatshop activists, she establishes this as secondary to the resolute efforts of successful campaigns.

Perhaps the only dirty laundry on United Students Against Sweatshops is something quite universal, organizational politics. Gender equality, racism and class wars are as much a conflict within student run organizations, as they are causes of global economic struggles. As exclamation points to each of Featherstone's chapters are insightfully intimate essays from students at the gut of the movement. What they reveal, even if unintentionally, is that by juggling organizational politics and addressing internal fallouts USAS, much like the campus experience, has the potential to engage real world solutions.

Students Against Sweatshops
Liza Featherstone and United Students Against Sweatshops
Published by Verso, 2002