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Foreign Policy
Spring 1999
Unions Plus
The past 10 years have seen a resurgence of creative actions to defend the rights of the traditionally powerless: sweatshop employees, informal-sector workers, child laborers, and immigrant workers. These initiatives range from the campaign against harsh conditions and low wages in the overseas factories that produce Nike shoes, to the drive for self-regulation in the form of voluntary codes of conduct by apparel makers, to the massive lobbying effort by immigrant workers that led to the adoption of a tough wage enforcement law in New York State in 1997. The driving force behind these campaigns has been a diverse coalition composed of organized labor, nonunion workers, activist lawyers, human rights groups, foundations, academics, and even celebrities.
By relying on a combination of legal action, media exposure of abuses, consumer boycotts, legislation, and negotiation, these coalitions have demonstrated a power far beyond what unions alone were able to achieve in the 1980s and 1990s with more traditional tactics. In today’s labor-abundant world, conventional strikes pose much less of a threat to mobile industries, but advocates have learned to apply pressure elsewhere.
One particularly noteworthy effort began in January 1999, when apparel workers on Saipan—part of the Northern Marianas Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the South Pacific—filed a massive lawsuit against 18 prominent American clothing manufacturers and retailers, charging them with conspiracy to hold workers in involuntary servitude in sweatshop conditions. The action seeks more than $1 billion in damages on behalf of as many as 50,000 workers. It alleges that many of the predominantly young immigrant women employed in the garment factories are forced to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and sometimes are denied pay if they fall behind on production quotas.
The lawsuit, still outstanding at the time this magazine went to press, is unusual not only in its size and scope but also in the number and kind of plaintiffs involved. The plaintiffs include nonunion apparel workers; the U.S. Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees; human rights organizations such as Global Exchange and Sweatshop Watch; and a group of private law firms. Reports from the U.S. Labor and Interior Departments form part of the brief.
The apparel firms are not only charged with violating wage and hours laws but also with violating international human rights law, local Marianas laws, U.S. anti-racketeering laws, and their own voluntary codes of conduct. The apparel companies targeted by the lawsuit have more to lose than just money. The Marianas case is another in a series of public-relations blows to an industry eager to shed the image of its factories as sweatshops—an image that consumers increasingly do not tolerate. More creative and broader-based actions appear to be putting some muscle back into demands for workers’ rights, and unions are finding that the scope for solidarity goes beyond the labor movement alone.
— K.N.