This past fall semester, I worked with national organizer Gisselle Cervantes to help students start a chapter of Students for International Labor Solidarity (SILS) at Loyola University Chicago, where I am a faculty member. Together, we reached out to students to invite them to the first meeting where I explained the causes of sweatshops in the global economy and what student activists can do about it. Gisselle discussed one of SILS’ ongoing campaigns: holding Nike accountable for wage theft at Hong Seng Knitting, one of their contract factories in Thailand.
Why did I get involved with SILS? My research shows how critical student activism has been in empowering sweatshop workers in the Global South to unionize and fight for their rights. SILS is in many ways the successor to United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), a group whose growth and strategy I analyzed in my book Strategizing Against Sweatshops: The Global Economy, Student Activism, and Worker Empowerment, based on extensive interviews with USAS members and other anti-sweatshop activists. (USAS remains active today but has shifted their focus largely to campus labor rights.)
As Gisselle and I explained, the structure of the global economy fosters exploitation. In industries like apparel and electronics, powerful companies like Nike outsource production to contract factories. These factories compete to offer the lowest costs, which often results in violating workers’ basic rights. If they didn’t routinely violate workers’ basic rights, these factories wouldn’t be able to stay in business.
During the meeting, we facilitated a brainstorming session with students on ways to pressure Loyola’s administration to hold Nike accountable. Loyola has a labor rights code of conduct for companies like Nike that produce Loyola-branded goods. On paper, these companies must respect workers’ rights, including the right to unionize, in order to maintain their license with the school. However, without student activism, these codes go unenforced. The students’ first action was hand-delivering a letter to the administration, demanding that Nike’s license be suspended until they address violations at Hong Seng.
Caption: Members of the Loyola Chicago chapter of SILS take action.
The dramatic worldwide rise in sweatshop working conditions is broadly linked to the promotion of economic globalization by business and governments since the 1970s. More specifically, it is the result of a particular strategy by companies in many industries: overseas outsourcing. In outsourcing, major firms contract out important parts of production to other, smaller firms. They do so around the world favoring countries with weak or under-enforced labor laws. Potential contractors are pitted against each other in a bidding war eliciting pledges to produce the goods at the quality and on the timeline big companies like Nike want and to do so more cheaply than their competitors. The industry that in many ways pioneered this outsourcing model is the apparel business. It is now the norm to outsource most or all production, while the major firms focus on the more profitable activities of design and marketing.
The big apparel companies have the power in this arrangement, giving them the ability to dictate not only prices, but other things—including working conditions—to their contractors. Companies like Nike do not explicitly require their contractors to run sweatshops. Indeed, they generally have their own corporate social responsibility programs that supposedly commit them to not using sweatshop labor. But, in practice, contract factories cannot meet the price expectations of the big companies without running sweatshops.
In its heyday, USAS was a central player in US and global anti-sweatshop activism. USAS mobilized their members to pressure college and university administrations directly. They demanded that the administrators put pressure on their licensing partners so that these big apparel firms, in turn, would put pressure on factories to which they outsource to recognize workers’ unions. This might sound like an unlikely chain of influence given the geographical and social distance between students on college campuses in the United States and workers in sweatshop factories in the Global South. But in a number of campaigns, it has been strikingly effective.
The key here is that many US colleges and universities have licensing deals with apparel companies, including major players like Nike and Reebok. These deals give those companies the right to produce clothing with school names and logos on them. The big apparel firms value these licensing deals since they allow them to market to a captive audience of students, among whom they hope to build lifetime brand loyalty.
USAS was able to use these licensing deals as a source of leverage over these firms. Through extended campus-based campaigns culminating in actions such as sit-ins and hunger strikes, USAS pressured college administrations across the US and Canada to implement pro-labor codes of conduct for their licensees and to join the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent organization that monitors companies’ compliance with schools’ codes of conduct. Licensees must, in turn, ensure their contractors are following the codes. When a company was found by the WRC to be violating these codes, USAS mobilized to pressure school administrators to suspend the guilty company’s license until such time as the violations have been resolved. USAS also established relationships with labor rights groups around the world, so they were able to coordinate their campaigns with workers campaigning to unionize or otherwise fight for their rights. With apparel companies seeking access to the student market and USAS organizing chapters at colleges around the country, this strategy was strikingly successful in a number of individual campaigns to help sweatshop workers in particular factories to unionize and secure other gains.
A diagram of how student activists can exercise power to help sweatshop workers
USAS carried out its first big international campaign in 2001,in support of workers at the South Korean-owned Kukdong plant in Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico. The plant was contracted to produce apparel for both Nike and Reebok for export to the US. The campaign is a good example of how effective the group’s strategy can be.
Officially, workers at the Kukdong plant belonged to a union, but it was a “yellow union” serving the interests of management, not the workers. Specifically, it was the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (Confederacion Revolucionario de Obreros y Campesinos or CROC), a union associated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). PRI ruled Mexico when it was a de facto single-party state from 1929 to 2000. Most workers were not even aware they belonged to the union and the leaders of the union simply lined their pockets with workers’ dues. When workers went on strike in January 2001 protesting against such things as the presence of maggots in their food and for the right to join an independent labor union, Kukdong’s management fired many of the workers, including the union’s leaders, and called in the police and CROC thugs to physically attack the workers. Many workers who had not been fired had to sign loyalty oaths to continue to work at Kukdong after the strike was repressed.
However, the workers were already in touch with US activists affiliated with USAS and other groups such as the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center. In response to reports of the crackdown, USAS used their leverage on college campuses to compel college administrators to threaten Nike and Reebok with the suspension of their college licensing agreements unless they acted to improve conditions at Kukdong. They did so and in September 2001, Kukdong’s management began to engage in good faith collective bargaining with an independent union democratically representing Kukdong’s workers. Kukdong—now operating under the name Mexmode—agreed to raises for the workers, to policies preventing abusive treatment of workers by management, ands to rehire workers laid off in the course of the labor struggle.
SILS is working to revive these sorts of campaigns, starting with support for the workers at Hong Seng Knitting. Hong Seng is not an isolated case. As documented by the WRC, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many large apparel firms simply refused to pay their contract factories for orders they had not already placed but that had already been physically manufactured. Many employers in turn laid off workers without severance pay to which they were legally entitled. In the case of Hong Seng, the factory owners forced employees to take “voluntary” unpaid leave by forcing them to sign documents waving the partial pay during the leave they were legally due under Thai law. These workers are already in a particularly desperate situation since they are migrants from Burma seeking to support their families.
The abuse of workers’ rights in sweatshops remains a pervasive, global problem. Given the unusual leverage student activists have over many large apparel companies, SILS’ revival of student-based campaigns to help workers like those at Hong Seng is critical to fighting for the rights of workers around the world.
Strategizing Against Sweatshops: The Global Economy, Student Activism, and Worker Empowerment is available through Temple University Press.
