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.