No sweat: teaching globalization over twenty years.

PROLOGUE

During Academic Year 1980-81 a colleague in Political Science and I decided to team teach a course on the globalization of capital and its effects on older and newer industrial regions. Our students, then as now, are mainly white, and mostly from suburbs. They include a substantial number of international students (15% or so), and they have a decidedly nonconformist campus culture. While our students do not sport stellar SAT averages, our atmosphere and policies encourage serious work by professors in classes and by students as well.

The course, Global Capitalism, was an advanced seminar in Socialogical theory and in International Relations. It ran, on and off, for about seventeen years. As a result of teaching it together Kent Trachte and I published a number of articles developing our own and some other colleagues' ideas about the development of global capitalism. We had been highly successful in involving students in serious seminar research and a number of student papers made empirical contributions to our articles. One memorable find was that of a student whose mother worked in the Brooklyn Borough Hall. He brought us a document that gave infant mortality rates by very small health data units within New York City -- over fifty of them. We picked the five worst in each borough and then compared them to comparable rates in a developing country. This was in aid of the proposition that the Third World interpenetrated the First. (Ross and Trachte 1983) We used the reappearance of sweatshop conditions in New York City's apparel industry to symbolize both globalization and a different idea about it than the notion that globalization meant people in rich countries got richer: we made class our unit of analysis, not nation. This was our early version of "the race to the bottom." Students were able to understand and absorb this approach when they themselves had done some work on it.

Our students, as indicated earlier, were and are largely middle and upper middle class, and the majority live in suburbs. Those who live in cities tend to have private school backgrounds. Few have working class parents. In the last few years though, this mix has been leavened by the children of immigrants, many first generation college attendees.

For most of our students, concepts of class and exploitation have little reality that they can personally envision, except in negative stereotypes. Merely hearing lectures was not so important to their learning as their own personal investment in the material. Research was one such method of engagement, one consistent with our roles in our departments and the ethos of our institution. In an undergraduate setting this integration of students into research was fairly exciting, and we influenced them to think about the new forms of capitalism in serious ways: our students were talking about the globalization of capital and restructuring of the economy ten years before "globalization" became a buzz word.

Over the next few years, my colleague left Clark, though our book was later published (Ross and Trachte 1990). Our students were changing too. My strong impression is that the combination of demographic changes, the loosening of the high school curriculum, and the end of the Cold War makes theoretical courses less popular and students less adept at handling them. After the fall of the state socialist challenge to capitalism as a way of life, students became less interested in systemic analysis of capitalism per se. The last time I taught the course was 1998. (1)

TEACHING THE NEW MOVEMENT

During Academic Year 1994-95, I was writing and thinking about the globalization of labor. Having written and published about the consequences of the globalization of capital, it seemed logical and personally gratifying to examine the ways workers might cooperate in the face of mobile capital. In the course of thinking about this I realized that there was a thread in the older New York City work that I had not followed up: the reemergence of sweatshop conditions in the US apparel industry. Experiencing the "call" to work on this as a labor of love and not academic toil, I determined to focus on the sweatshop issue -- through research and "consciousness raising."

My decision to begin work on the sweatshop problem came before the current upsurge in publicity and interest began. To be sure, the apparel workers' union -- UNITE -- had been making a variety of overtures to broader constituencies, but these had not yet found resonance. Advocacy groups, for example, Charles Kernaghan and the National Labor Committee, had done some excellent exposes of US "planned" sweatshops in Central America, but after brief television exposure, no dynamic movement followed up.

Just as I had made my own decision to focus on the sweatshop matter, two major new stories were about to break. On August 2, 1995, a task force led by the California Industrial Relations Department, and including the Immigration and Naturalization Service, raided a covert garment factory in El Monte, California. Finding 72 workers held in virtual slavery, authorities unraveled a Chinese-Thai ring running two garment contractor shops and smuggling people.

My research indicates Monte event caused a major upsurge in newspaper reporting about the sweatshop issue -- especially on the West Coast. Just as the incident and its aftermath were about to fade into "background" obscurity, on May 1,1996 Kathie Lee Gifford cried on television. Embarrassed by Charles Kernaghan's revelations about the Wal-Mart produced line of clothing she endorsed, the Gifford affair now gave newspaper coverage a very big boost in East Coast and national media, causing about a tripling of sweatshop stories.

Two other changes created a broader constituency for the sweatshop issue and the movement that embraced the cause of preventing labor abuse. The first of these was the reform movement within the AFL-CIO, causing a qualitatively more open atmosphere and welcoming attitude toward community solidarity movements. In addition, that openness came at a time when college students were once again at the brink of mobilization.

So it was that in 1998 I decided to try a first year seminar on the sweatshop issue. As distinct from my earlier global capitalism course, this was not theoretical, though it rested on the foundation I had worked out earlier. The fall 1998 version of No Sweat: The New Sweatshops in Global Context (repeated for first year students in Fall 2000, and taught for advanced students at Wheaton College in 1999) (2) had a number of other distinctive qualities.

In the first instance, the course is heavily oriented to the World Wide Web. The syllabus is posted (3) on the web and is loaded with hot links to resources, including the Smithsonian Institution historical exhibit, Between A Rock and a Hard Place, (4) Jacob Riis photographs, (5) Nicaragua free trade zones, (6) etc. Presentations in this course are highly oriented to the visual, searching for pictures and graphic material whenever possible. I freely bring my movement experience into the course. Over the last few years I have given over sixty talks and lectures on the sweatshop issue, sometimes discussing with young activists the relation of their concerns to those of my Students for A Democratic Society comrades a generation ago. I tell them in I class about the talks I have recently given, I make very effort to bring antisweatshop leaders to the campus, and of course, I lecture on my research and show pictures from my various field investigations. It is my belief that in this fashion I accomplish two things : I normalize the idea that social knowledge and scholarship are appropriately obtained from and applied to real world ethical and policy issues and that scholarship and activism are compatibly, even desirably mixed.

The course proceeds historically starting with sweatshop conditions in the American apparel industry at the beginning of the 20th Century. For dramatic effect we encounter the Triangle Factory Fire early on, and I project photographs of it and Riis' pictures of sweated workers on the Lower East Side of New York. After tracing the reforms and conditions that, I contend, virtually ended sweatshop abuses by the end of World War II, the course material and lectures turn to the reappearance of extreme labor abuse in New York and Los Angeles. In order to explain this the material now "goes global." We spend three weeks examining labor conditions in Central America, China and South Asia. We also discuss trends in American politics: deregulation, etc.

I try to use visuals to make the material concrete. I use PowerPoint presentations incorporating pictures I copy from the web, material from reports of the major NGO's on labor rights (conveniently available on the Word Wide Web), and charts and graphs to illustrate such things as imports from poor countries or wages in those countries.

Among the problems I encounter in conveying this material are those to which I alluded earlier. Students coming to sociology courses are self-selecting. Often that selection is one, in its negative aspect, which rejects the "cold" quantification of economics and the "scienristic" aspects of psychology. Positively, many of our students hope to hear "stories" in the voices of victims. Thus structural information and economic material, especially when it is numerical in nature, goes counter to the expectations that many students have when they come to the course originally.

Another problem is the almost total lack of historical context for student learning. Labor history is an empty category for our college students -- for advanced ones, no less than entering first year students. Take, for example, the following statement that could be found in any own writing or in any overview of the era: "The founding of the CIO was an important event in creating the conditions that produced the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and the subsequent enforcement I of the minimum wage and 40 hour work week." I may place a law intelligibly in the context of the New Deal. The latter is a phrase my students know and the eighty-five percent who were educated in the United States further know that the New Deal signified more activist government. So, the Fair Labor Standards Act is a comprehensible, more or less contextualized and assimilable fact. But the CIO requires a whole briefing. It will take, and usually does, 3-5% of total class time for the semester to explain that single sentence.

The major student assignment in the course is a team-oriented research paper. For first year students in particular, a major research assignment is daunting. Making the project a team effort evens out the skills and allows mutual support to develop. Team project papers are usually superior to those written by one student.

The team project may also have group process problems. The most typical one is the under-producer: his or her teammates often grow resentful. My own contribution to the maturation of my students is to listen, especially in private, to their complaints, and to give advice on how a student feeling wronged might approach another. But I never intervene. Everyone on the team gets the same grade for the product. This is a moment in their long learning about collaboration and responsibility. Since they choose their own teammates, the latter is especially important.

The first two times I taught this seminar students had a freer choice of research topics than they did this last year. In the Fall of 2000, however, I tied the assignment to current projects of the anti-sweatshop movement on campus. The assignment produced good information and bound the class together in an interesting way.

In the first version and for the advanced students, research topics were self-chosen, with heavy advice and pump priming. The danger is centrifugal effects. If the topics are too dispersed, student experience of the course begins to dilute: discussion, say of retail concentration as a source of power in the clothing industry, may not be so compelling to a student working on the history of song by and about women textile workers. The dilemma of course is that the very creative paper about women workers' songs, by a Wheaton senior, would not have come out of a more structured experience.

This year one group worked on the structure of the Barnes and Noble Corporation and the college bookstore chain that is related to it. Students doing this paper learned some basic techniques in researching a corporation and blended these with a strategic perspective on the issue of obtaining a sweat-free stream of campus logo clothing. Two somewhat older students who assisted me in the course did a paper about the possibility of a corporate campaign focusing on Barnes and Noble. This was an excellent piece of strategic thinking based on solid empirical work.

Finally, the course--and my own approach to the labor abuse issue in globalization--is somewhat distinctive because it approaches the global problem by trying to explain why sweatshop conditions reappeared in the American garment industry after having been all but eradicated from roughly 19401980. Students confront American sweatshops before they confront Chinese or Nicaraguan ones.

The course was, I think, a qualified success. Here is the qualification: The course raises the consciousness and arouses the moral sensibility of most of the students and it shows them the channels they may rake to work on the issue. It is not so successful in giving them an alternative conceptual framework to what has become widely called "neoliberalism" or "corporate globalization." My students, for example, had a hard time articulating a position for the global regulation of child labor when I asked them to respond (in an essay question) to Third World claims that such regulation was an imperialist imposition, and poor families needed the wages of children to survive. They have similar problems in responding to the "better than" argument: sweatshop jobs are better than pounding bricks, better than prostitution, better than rural famine. This conceptual deficiency, on reflection, is a direct result of my design: I use concrete empirical material and examples, and assign few theoretical materials.

By contrast, my colleague in our International Studies Stream, Prof. Richard Peet, teaches the core lecture course, which is more theoretical, and in which he criticizes heavily the neoliberal framework of contemporary globalization. That course produces a much more articulate alternative consciousness. We are fortunate to have each other, to be sure, but my own sense of future change in my course design will push it toward the conceptual. The reason is this: whatever my own current inclinations to stay very factual, in the long run activists and citizens need a framework within which they can analyze and evaluate new information and new contentions. A conceptual framework that allows an alternative to the logic of neo-liberalism will last longer than any particular empirical material I develop. We need to meet the heartfelt vigor of the new wave of activists with the moral vigor and the intellectual rigor that will prepare them for the next steps in their lives.

ENDNOTES

(1.) http://www.clarku.edu/~rross/globalcap.htm

(2.) Wheaton College students are mainly white and middle class, similar to Clark's, but without Clark's c. 15% international students, or its "quirky" cultural atmosphere. Wheaton periodically awards William I. Cole Professorships to scholars doing interesting work so that they may teach a research seminar to advanced undergraduates.

(3.) http://www.clarku.edu/~rross/calsyl_files/calsyl.htm

(4.) http://americanhistory.si.edu/sweatshops/

(5.) http://www.cis.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/riis41.gif

(6.) http://www.nlcnet.org/nicaragua/

REFERENCES

Ross, Robert J.S. and Kent M. Trachte. 1990. Global Capitalism: The New Leviathan. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990.

Robert Ross and Kent Trachte. 1983. "Global Cities, Global Classes: The Peripheralization of Labor in New York City." Review, VI, 3, Winter, pp. 393-431.

ROBERT J.S. ROSS is Professor of Sociology, Director of the International Studies Stream, and co-founder of the Program on Urban Development and Social Change at Clark University.