Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World.

Edited by Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson. Rethinking Schools Publications, 2002.

Let me start by saying who I am, and why I am reviewing this book. I am an eighth-grade student at the Longfellow School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I used Rethinking Globalization in a school project, and it was so helpful that I agreed to write a review about how useful the book is in the classroom. I learned so much from this book--I can't say too many good things about it.

My assignment was to choose a topic and do a research project on it. Each student had to choose his or her own subject for the project, and then present the results in an evening event at the school. This was called the "specialist" project. I chose to do my project on the effects of globalization in Asia. My focus was on sweatshop labor.

Rethinking Globalization was especially helpful to me because it was designed as a classroom textbook. In addition to regular articles, the book (which is large-sized) is full of tools for thinking and writing about sweatshops. There are graphs and statistics. There are drawings, photographs, political cartoons, and poetry. I think that all the different forms of materials that are included in this book would give people with many ways of thinking a chance to understand and learn about sweatshops. It's not all numbers with no human story. It's not all argument with no hard numbers, either.

Furthermore, the book also includes activities to do with a class and questions to think about after reading. It's a book you can really use because you interact with it. It's well-laid out so you can choose the pieces you want to use, rather than getting lost trying to read it cover to cover. The language is reader-friendly. Some of the articles used terminology that I didn't quite understand, but I was able to look those words up and then I could understand all the articles. Many of the articles were understandable right away.

The book is divided into big sections, such as on Child Labor, Global Sweatshops, Colonialism, and Environmental Issues. This way of organizing the articles makes it easy to find the pieces you need for your particular focus. In my "specialist" report, I had different chapters on different aspects of globalization and I was able was to tie different parts of Rethinking Globalization to sections of my report.

Rethinking Globalization wasn't the only book I used in my report, but it was the one I liked the best. Other books I used included No Sweat, edited by Andrew Ross, and No Logo, by Naomi Klein. I also used some informational web sites from anti-sweatshop organizations like behindthelabel.org. I also visited the websites of the different companies accused of using sweatshop labor (Nike, the Gap, Disney) to see what they had to say about the topic. Most of them had some type of pledge on their website, promising not to use exploitative labor. I fed that this shows that the "no sweat" movement has put some pressure on the companies because they feel the need to respond. Otherwise, I doubt they would bring it up in the first place. It's hard to know whether the companies honor their pledges. But in fact, the policies they actually admit to are bad enough. The Nike web site has a short "virtual tour" of a Nike factory in Vietnam. (Nike has a total of 40,000 employees in that country, so it's a big employer there.) The web site says that the average monthly wage of a Nike contract worker in Vietnam is $54 per month. (This is the average, so imagine how little the lowest paid workers get!)

The chapter I really liked the most is the one about the Pakistani child-labor activist, Iqbal Masih. He was a child worker himself until he refused to work under slave conditions. At eleven, he began to work with the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, and when he was thirteen years old, he was giving talks on the need to end child labor. Iqbal was murdered at the age of thirteen.

This book would be especially good for high school and college teachers wanting to introduce globalization. The way the book is made, you can choose the pieces you want to use, or use it as a reference to look things up. But taken all together, it's incredibly powerful. Rethinking Globalization made me want to do more work myself to end sweatshop labor. In the meantime, I have begun to insist on wearing clothes that I know are "no sweat."

JACOB RUBIN is a middle-schooler in the public schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts.