Teaching about sweatshops and the global economy.

"How often do you see stu dents protesting the exploitation of labor," a friend and fellow political economist, asked me late one evening. "They deserve our support," he insisted.

Of course they do. That is why last Fall I taught "Sweatshops and the Global Economy," a first year seminar at Wheaton College, a small New England liberal arts college, where I have worked for over two decades.

But teaching a first year seminar about sweatshops was not always the act of solidarity I had imagined. In class, I found myself confronting many of the same arguments I had encountered writing a reply to the defenders of globalization and critics of the anti-sweatshop movement (Collins and Miller, 2000).

That is hardly surprising. After all, every entering student at Wheaton is required to take a first year seminar. Engaging those students, nor the group of sweatshop activists I had somehow convinced myself would be raking my course, was something I struggled with all semester.

Those struggles are much of what I report on in my article. I developed techniques (exercises, arguments, and discussion strategies), and found materials (videos, pamphlets, personal testimonies) that worked--engaged the students in a critical analysis of sweatshops, of the effects of globalization, and of the role of women in the world export factories. But many times my efforts fell short. I try to report honestly what I learned from those efforts as well.

INSIDE SWEATSHOPS AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

"Sweatshops and the Global Economy" was one of eighteen sections of Wheaton's seminar program for first year students. The sixteen students who selected my seminar were much like those in my other classes, although a bit more open to thinking about their place in the world economy. One of them was a sweatshop activist and several others were concerned about sweatshops and curious about what they might do to combat their spread. Other students were there because they were interested in economic issues, and some merely because they had to take a first year seminar.

More of my students were women than men, about two-thirds, which is typical of Wheaton, a former women's college. All but one of the students were white, and most came from seemingly privileged backgrounds. A few had attended prep school. But one student was from inner-city New York, two were the children of school teachers, and another came from backwoods Maine.

My students' academic skills varied widely: from students who read critically and wrote skillfully, to those who read with difficulty and had problems writing. I suspect that their mix of skills was typical of a second tier liberal arts college, Wheaton's rank in the U.S. News and World Report's ratings.

The political sophistication of the students varied greatly as well. One had never heard right and left used as political terms. A few possessed a critical sense of the inequalities of today's economy. But others, though readily allowing that third world economies were riddled with inequalities, took umbrage at any suggestion that the rewards of U.S. society were distributed unfairly.

Perhaps the one trait most of my students shared was that they were quieter than my other students. That is not unusual for a group of first year students. With a few exceptions, the bulk of my students were struggling to find their voice. This was true of the men as well as the women and of some of my very best students.

The content of my sweatshop seminar is much like that of the few other sweatshop courses that I know about, all of which are taught by sociologists. Like those courses, it covers the return of sweatshops to the United States, the proliferation of sweatshops in Latin America and Asia, the globalization of the clothing, athletic footwear, or toy industries, and union, consumer, and student efforts to combat sweatshops. (1)

In one important way, the content of my course differs from that of other sweatshop courses. As a political economist, I place far more emphasis on confronting the arguments of mainstream economists who maintain that sweatshops better the lives of the world's poor and that the anti-sweatshop movement is counter-productive. Confronting those arguments also helped my seminar conform to the "The Great Controversies" theme of the First Year Seminar program.

The seminar reflected my training in political economy and my experience teaching economics to conservative students in different ways. For instance, I dedicate time to malting the case that women who work in the world export factories we call sweatshops are exploited. That is something that instructors in other disciplines might not feel obligated to do. Also, to be able to confront the critics of the anti-sweatshop movement, the course explores broader themes about the economics of globalization and world poverty.

EXERCISES IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SWEATSHOPS

I developed or borrowed from others several exercises in political economy as tools for engaging students in the study of sweatshops. Let me tell you about two of them.

Exercise #1: Exploiting Commodity Fetishism 

Believe it or not, the right place to start any sweatshop course is with Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. No, I don't mean with a long-winded exegesis of Marx's explanation of how commodities become the bearers of social relations in a capitalist economy (Marx: 1967).

But I do start with the assertion that purchasing commodities brings us in contact with the lives of the factory workers who manufacture them. Buying jeans, t-shirts, or sneakers made in Los Angeles, Bangkok or Jakarta, or the export zones of southern China and Latin America, connects students to the women who are working long hours in unhealthy and dangerous conditions for little pay in the apparel and athletic footwear industries. Students in the anti-sweatshop movement, without having sloughed through Marx's Capital, understand that connection and want desperately to put a stop to the brutalization and assaults on human dignity suffered by these women whose labor manufactures their commodities.

Sweatshop organizers know that commodities can reveal underlying social relations. (2) For instance, the "Rethinking Schools" curriculum on sweatshops and The Smithsonian sweatshop exhibit, "Between A Rock and A Hard Place," recommend the following exercise to introduce students to sweatshops. Have students look at the tags of their r-shirts, identify the countries where their clothes are made, and then find those countries on a map. The Smithsonian website also provides data on U.S. apparel imports from different countries and the prevailing average hourly wage in their apparel industries.

The global production game, as the Smithsonian website calls it, got my course off to a good start. On the first day of class, students helped one another read the tags of their t-shirts. Students placed flags on a world map showing where their clothes were made, then told us about the prevailing wages in the apparel industries in those countries. (3)

Many of my assignments built on these initial connections. Workers' personal testimonies (e.g., Liu, 2000) and other readings acquainted us with the lives of apparel, toy, and footwear workers in China, El Salvador, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam, as well as Los Angeles and New York in the United States. A library assignment, a standard feature of a first year seminar, asked students to develop on annotated bibliography about one group of workers (in a particular industry or country) and then present their findings to the class.

Among these materials, Made in China, the National Labor Committee pamphlet, was especially effective (Kernaghan, 2000). It is filled with short summaries and pictures describing the horrifying conditions at Chinese factories producing goods for U.S. corporations, including Wal-Mart and Nike, and closes with a list of imprisoned labor organizers. In some of these factories young women work as long as 70 hours a week, are paid just pennies an hour after pay deductions for board and room, and often live in dormitory rooms with as many as 15 other workers.

Several videos about sweatshops are now available, most distributed by Global Exchange or the National Labor Committee. My favorite is "Global Village or Global Pillage." (Brecher et al, 2000) Its animation engaged my students. Its interviews with women across Asia and Latin America made dear the truly global effects of "the race to the bottom." Users of sweatshop videos need to be careful, however, since some repeat the same themes and sometimes even parts of the same interviews.

During the semester, my students referred repeatedly to some of these stories. One was a video interview in which National Labor Committee director Charles Kernaghan holds up to the camera a newspaper advertisement with a picture of a young woman at work on a factory sewing machine. The ad reads, "Rosa Martinez produces apparel for US markets on her sewing machine in El Salvador. You can hire her for 57-cents an hour." Then Kernaghan holds up the same ad, published one year later, but it now reads, "you can hire her for 33-cents a hour." (National Labor Committee, 1995).

Another was the anthropologist Patricia Fernandez-Kelly's "Maquiladoras: The view from the inside." Her article brings readers inside an apparel factory in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, just across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas. We accompany her to an interview which includes an on-the-job sewing test, suffer along with her as she confronts the unrelenting pace of the work on the line, and learn about the lives of her fellow workers. Despite the fact that these women earn the minimum wage and work 48 hours a week (conditions better than those of most apparel workers in developing countries), we are convinced when Fernandez concludes that, "the life profile of a maquiladora woman is a saga of downward mobility." (Fernandez-Kelly, 1997: 214)

Exercise #2: What Is a sweatshop?

The answer to the question what is a sweatshop is less straight-forward than you might think. Most anti-sweatshop groups use a legal definition to track the return of sweatshops to the United States. They define sweatshop operators as employers who violate two or more labor laws, from the prohibition of child labor, to health, safety, fire and building codes, to forced-overtime and the minimum wage.

Other sweatshop critics, such as labor economist Michael Piore, insists that the term sweatshop should be reserved for "a specific organization of work" characterized by "very low fixed costs" (Piore, 1997: 136). In sweatshops, workers are usually paid by the piece. Other fixed costs--rent, electricity, heat--are held to a minimum by operating substandard, congested, unhealthy factories, typically overseen by a "sweater" or subcontractor (Piore, 1997: 135).

Still others of us favor the broader, looser use of the term sweatshop as a vivid metaphor for a lousy job. We worry that a narrow definition of sweatshops lets off the hook too many low wage employers who might meet minimum wage and safety requirements, but seldom provide their employees with an adequate standard of living.

After discussing the different definitions of sweatshops, I asked students to read several newspaper and magazine articles that use the term sweatshop, and to decide if the article used the term appropriately. The goal of the exercise was to sharpen their analytical sense of what constitutes a sweatshop, a term mainstream economists complain is nothing other than a vague, ill-defined pejorative. We read "Sweatshops of the Streets" about bicycle messengers (Lipsyte, 1995), "The New Sweatshops" about asbestos-removers and immigrant flower pickers (Begley, 1990), about workers on cruise ships--"sweatshops at sea" (Reynolds and Weikel, 2000), about "Sweatshops for Janitors" (Cleeland, 2000), and even why "adjunct profs at our colleges might as well be sweatshop workers." (Scarff, 2000)

To my surprise students found this exercise to be something other than the instructive lark I had thought it would be. Applying a consistent standard to defining a sweatshop is indeed a difficult exercise. Beyond that, the responses of several students were either defensive or openly hostile. It was one thing to label export factories in the third world or even immigrant populated factories in the U.S. apparel industry sweatshops. But to suggest that a broad swath of U.S. workers labored under sweatshop-like conditions while being denied equal opportunity or a chance for advancement was quite another. Some students instructed bicycle messengers to go back to school, disputed that cruise ship conditions were as bad as reported, and suggested that farm work has always been hard. Other students took the exercise as intended and tried to parse each example with a consistent definition of a sweatshop. They learned a great deal, although I worried that I had robbed them of some their certainty about what constitute d "sweatshop" abuse.

CONFRONTING THE CRITICS OF THE ANTI-SWEATSHOP MOVEMENT

"The overwhelming mainstream view among economists," reports economist Paul Krugman, "is that the growth of sweatshop employment is tremendous good news for the world's poor." (Levinson, 1997) While a maverick on some issues, Krugman, like most economists, is convinced that low-wage world-export factory jobs, the very kind we usually call sweatshops, better the lives of these workers and their families.

As a political economist, I felt a special obligation to take on those arguments. My seminar devoted time to understanding exactly what economists have to say in defense of sweatshops. In one class we developed a list of their arguments, which I then typed up and asked students to respond to point by point in the next class. I then typed up and distributed our responses as an "indictment of sweatshops."

This is a difficult assignment, perhaps a bit over the heads of some of my students and more appropriate for upper level economics and social science majors. And it is risky business as well. Sustained exposure to these arguments can dull anyone's critique of sweatshops, and allows more conservative students to inoculate themselves against most any indictment of sweatshops.

Still I am convinced that taking on the mainstream economist's defense of sweatshops was worthwhile. Articulating these arguments in the seminar gave progressive students an opportunity to practice responding to arguments they would surely confront outside of the seminar. At the same time, the exercise provided an opportunity to speak directly to the positions my more conservative students held, even if they could not articulate them. The result was some of our most spirited discussions. Also, I was quite pleased with my students' performance when I gave them the in-class assignment of reading and analyzing The New York Times Magazine article, "Two Cheers for Sweatshops," by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who won a Pulitzer prize for their coverage of China. Most students were able to identify the arguments WuDunn and Kristof relied on to defend sweatshops and to fashion a response to them.

Taking on these arguments is risky business for yet another reason. The defense of sweatshops offered up by mainstream economists is a challenging one. Their argument turns on two elegantly simple and ideologically powerful propositions. The first is that women freely choose to enter these jobs, and the second is that these sweatshop jobs are better than the alternative employments available to women in developing economies. Worse yet, both propositions have a certain truth to them.

From the perspective of mainstream economics, every exchange, including the exchange between worker and boss, is freely entered into and only takes place because both parties are made better off. Hiring workers to fill the jobs in the world export factories is no exception and, as they see it, that alone demonstrates that these factories are not sweatshops or sires of exploitation.

Of course, in some cases workers do not freely enter into sweatshop employment even by the usual standards of wage labor. Sometimes workers are held captive (e.g., the Thai women working in the El Monte factory outside of Los Angeles) or find themselves working jobs far different than those they were recruited to do from their rural villages (e.g., that is often the case in China). Even the most conservative of my students acknowledged that those practices must be opposed.

But in most cases, women do choose these jobs, if hardly freely or without the coercion of economic necessity. The ability of the exchange perspective of mainstream economics to obscure the underlying power differences in those exchanges was enough to convince a few students that these jobs were neither sweatshops nor exploitative.

The antidote to this argument I used in my course came from an unusual source: an economist, Linda Lim, who during the 1990s wrote quite critically about gender analyses of the oppression of women on the global assembly line and who today is dismissive of the efforts of the anti-sweatshop movement.

In her earlier work, Lim reports that in East Asia, "the wages earned by women in export factories are usually higher than what they could earn as wage laborers in alternative low-skilled female occupations." (Lim, 1990: 109) But at the same time, the wages of women in the export industries are lower than the wages of men who work in those industries and lower than those of first world women who work in the same industries. That is true, even though third world women's productivity "is acknowledged to be higher than that of either of these other groups." (Lim, 1997: 223) Even for Lim that makes these women "the most heavily exploited group of workers relative both to their output and other groups." (Lim, 1997:223)

Whatever Lim's work suggests about the relative attractiveness of these factory jobs, it went a long way toward convincing my students that the women who work in the world's export factories are exploited. The fact that even for dresses made in the United States typically just $6 of a dress that retails for $100 goes to the woman who actually sewed it (Bonacich and Applebaum, 2000: 2) further convinced my students that the labor of these women is the source of profit for manufacturers and retailers.

Later in the course I stumbled upon a more effective response to the mainstream economic argument. It is simply this: Their argument is irrelevant for determining if a factory is a sweatshop or if workers are exploited. Sweatshop conditions are defined by the characteristics of a job. If workers are denied the right to organize, suffer unsafe and abusive working conditions, are forced to work overtime, or are paid less than a living wage, then they work in a sweatshop regardless of how they came to take their jobs or if the alternatives they face are worse yet. That realization helped several of my students who had been struggling with the dilemmas presented by the exchange perspective of mainstream economics.

SWEATSHOPS AND WORLD POVERTY

Still, neither of these responses speaks directly to the contention that sweatshop jobs, whatever their problems, are good for the world's poor because the other jobs available to them, especially in the informal sector and rural agricultural, are yet worse.

This is no fabrication of mainstream economists. Michael Todaro, an economist with some progressive credentials, writes in his economic development textbook that, "Perhaps the most valid generalizations about the poor are that they are disproportionately located in rural areas." Todaro, 1999:151).

But this is no reason to dismiss the concerns of the anti-sweatshop movement. It does, however, suggest that the plight of sweatshop workers needs to be seen in the context of pervasive world poverty and the gaping inequalities of the global economy. Like most teachers trained in economics and political economy, I relied on too many handouts of data and charts during the semester. But two handouts caught my students' attention and helped to expose them to the pervasiveness of world poverty and the tremendous privilege afforded to most all of them by the world economy. One was a World Bank table reporting that in today's global economy nearly half of the world's population lives in poverty, making do on less than $2 U.S. a day. The other was a sketch of the global distribution of income, published by The United Nations Development Programme, resembling a champagne glass. The richest 20% of the world's population, who receive 82.7% of the total world income, fill out the mouth of the glass, while the bottom 60 % who get just 5.6% of the world's income, fill in the stem.

The global economy, to the extent that we live in a truly unified market place, connects us nor just with sweatshop workers, but with oppressed workers outside the factory gates as well. By pointing out these connections I hoped to convince my students of the need to build a movement that would demand more for working people across the multiple dimensions of the world economy. Campaigns to improve conditions in the world export factories should of course be part of that movement. After all, struggles against sweatshops lead to improved working conditions in the United States, including the minimum wage, the forty-hour work week, and other protections. But that movement must also tackle the often worse conditions of low wage agriculture workers, poor farmers, street vendors, domestic servants, small shop textile workers, and prostitutes. Only when conditions for both groups of workers improve might we be able to say honestly, as something other than a Faustian bargain, that more world factory jobs are good new s for the world's poor.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

My syllabus promised to pay special attention to what we should and can do about sweatshop labor. Throughout the semester, we discussed successful examples of consumer and student activism, e.g., the National Labor Committee campaign against Gap in El Salvador. Early on in the semester we outlined what we thought should be done about sweatshops and developed a labor code to be implemented internationally. When we returned to that labor code in the last weeks of class, most students wanted to amend it to make it tougher, insisting that it impose a living wage.

But this was not enough to overcome most students' sense of political helplessness. Even at the end of the semester during our most extensive discussions of trade union, consumer, and student activism, many were still struggling to find their voice. During the Fall semester my students did not organize to push Wheaton, currently a member of the Fair Labor Association, to join the Workers Right Consortium that insists that producers of college logo apparel submit to independent monitoring and pay a living wage. But this Spring three students from the seminar have been active in the sweatshop debates on campus, and I heard them reply to the defenders of sweatshops with arguments we developed in the seminar.

I still hope that some of my students will do yet more. I know that many of them were moved when they read economic journalist William Greider's words, "the recognition that human dignity is indivisible should be the bottom line of the global economy, not profits per se." (Greider, 1997: 356)."

ENDNOTES

(1.) Bob Ross, a sociologist at Clark University; who teaches a freshman seminar and an upper division course on sweatshops, advised me as I constructed my syllabus and selected books and reading materials for my seminar. I use three of the same books Bob does. The outline of my syllabus and a list of helpful website locations are contained in appendices to my article (page 13). My complete syllabus is posted at http://www2.wheatonma.edu/Academic/AcademicDept/Economics/Syllabi/Syl labi.html

(2.) Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate, also knows that commodities can reveal social relations to his readers. For instance, in his poem "Shirt," which I use in class, Pinsky contemplates "nearly invisible stitches along the collar turned in sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians" and recalls, "the infamous blaze at the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames on the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes." (Pinsky; 1996: 84-85).

(3.) This exercise works with almost any audience. A few years back, I saw Medea Benjamin, the Director of Global Exchange, begin her plenary address about sweatshops at the summer conference of the Union for Radical Political Economists by asking the audience to look a the tags of their t-shirts and find out where they are made. That group of aging political economists seemed every bit as engaged in the exercise as my students were.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brecher, Jeremy et al. 2000. Global Village or Global Village. Video. World Economy Project, Preamble Center, Washington, D.C. Also distributed by Global Exchange.

Cleeland, Nancy. July 2, 2000. Heartache on Aisle 3: Sweatshops for Janitors. Los Angeles Times.

Collins Jessica and Miller, John. Sept./Oct. 2000. Know-Nothings and Know-It-Alls: What's wrong with the hype about globalization. Dollars & Sense, No. 231.

Fernandez-Kelly, Patricia. 1997. Maquiladoras: The View from the Inside. In The Women, Gender, and Development Reader edited by Visvanathan et al. London: Zed Book

Greider, William. 1997. One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. Simon & Schuster. New York.

Kernaghan, Charles. 2000. Made in China. The Role of US. Companies in Denying Human and Worker Rights. New York, National Labor Committee.

Kristof, Nicholas. June 15, 1998. Asia's Crisis Upsets Rising Effort to Confront Blight of Sweatshops. New York Times.

Kristof, Nicholas and WuDunn, Sheryl. Sept. 24, 2000. Two Cheers for Sweatshops. New York Times Levinson, Mark. Fall 1997. Economists and Sweatshops. Dissent.

Lim, Linda. 1990. Women's Work in Export Factories. In Persistent Inequalities, edited by Tinker. New York Oxford University Press.

Lim , Linda. 1997. Capitalism, Imperialism, and Patriarchy. In The Women, Gender, and Development Reader edited by Visvanathan et al. London: Zed Books.

Liu. Lisa. Sept./Oct. 2000. The Story of a Garment Worker" as told to David Bacon. Dollars & Sense, No. 231.

Lipsyte, Robert. May 14, 1995. Voices From the 'Sweatshop of the Streets.' New York Times.

Marx, Karl. 1967. Capital Vol. 1. New York International Publisher Co. Inc.

National Labor Committee. 1995. Zoned For Slavery: The Child Behind the Label. Video.

Pinsky, Robert. 1996. "The Shirt" in The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 New York Harper-Collins.

Piore, Michael. 1997. The Economics of the Sweatshop. In No Sweat: fashion, free trade, and the rights of garment workers, edited by Andrew Ross. New York Verso.

Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. New York Beacon Press.

Reynolds, Christopher and Weikel, Dan. May 30, 2000. For Cruise Ship Workers, Voyages Are No Vacations. Los Angeles Times.

Ross, Andrew. 1997. After the Year of the Sweatshop: Postscript. In No Sweat: fashion, flee trade, and the rights of garment workers:, edited Andrew Ross. New York Verso.

Scarf, Michelle. May 15, 2000. The Full-Time Stress of Part Time Professors: For the pittance they're paid, adjunct profs at our colleges might as well be sweatshop workers. Newsweek.

Su, Julie. 1997. El Monte Thai Garment Workers: Slave Sweatshops. In No Sweat: fashion, free trade, and the rights of garment workers:, edited Andrew Ross. New York: Verso.

Todaro, Michael. 1999. Economic Development 7th edition. New York Addison Wesley Publishing Co.

Varley, Pamela. 1998. The Sweatshop Quandary: Corporate Responsibility on the Global Frontier. Washington, DC. Investor Responsibility Research Center.

RELATED ARTICLE: SYLLABUS: SWEATSHOPS AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

COURSE DESCRIPTION

A century ago, when immigrants from eastern and southern Europe came to the United States, they often found jobs as sewers and stitchers in the garment industry, working long hours in unhealthy and dangerous conditions for little pay. These sweatshop conditions have now returned to the United States, especially in the factories of the apparel industry, and spread across the global economy. Today, sweatshop workers, whether working in a Los Angeles barrio, a Bangkok slum, or an export-zone of South China or El Salvador make our t-shirts, sneakers, and toys.

This seminar engages students in the controversy regarding sweatshops and their role in the global economy. We will read pieces written by economists praising sweatshops to the sky as well as stinging critiques of factory work and sweatshops. We ask why sweatshops have returned to the United States, now the richest economy in the world. We also ask why the spread of sweatshops in the developing world often seems to contribute, on the one hand, to the alleviation of measured poverty and, on the other hand, to the "immiseration" of factory workers. Using electronic and printed resources, including workers' testimonies and economic analyses of export factories, we look closely at examples drawn from the apparel industry, the toy industry, and the athletic footwear industry in Los Angeles and New York City, and in China, El Salvador, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The seminar pays special attention to what we should and can do about sweatshop labor and asks students to develop an appropriate public response to sweatshops, as well as poor peoples' and workers' movements in the developing world. We will ask if industrial codes of conduct and the recent self-monitoring efforts of corporations such as Reebok and Mattel are effective ways to regulate sweatshops. In addition, we will assess the impact of social movements -- first-world anti-sweatshop movements led by consumers, religious groups, and students and third-world workers' and poor peoples' movements -- have had on sweatshop conditions.

REQUIRED BOOKS

Behind The Label: Inequality in The Los Angeles Apparel Industry by Edna Bonacich and Richard Applebaum.

Made in China: The Role of U.S. Companies in Denying Human and Worker Rights by Charles Kemaghan, National Labor Committee.

No Sweat: Fashion, Free trade, and The Rights of Garment Workers edited by Andrew Ross.

The Sweatshop Quandary: Corporate Responsibility on the Global Frontier edited by Pamela Varley.

Photocopied Packet of Readings available in Knapton 007 (for $10).

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Class Participation

A seminar allows each of us to try out new ideas, to learn from each other, and to develop our critical facilities. All of this is possible only if each of us is willing to participate actively in our class discussions. Part of your grade will be based upon the quantity and quality of your class participation. This is just as much a requirement for the course as any written assignment.

A comedian once said that, "90% of life is showing up." While effective class participation requires more than just showing up, you certainly can't be a regular participant in our class discussions if you don't show up. I will expect you to attend each class. Missing more than two classes will lower your final grade.

Readings and Discussion Questions. To get the most out of class time, we much come to class prepared, having read, or even reread, the assigned material. Each class will begin with our questions from the readings. Also, to help analyze the readings, I will ask you to complete and turn in discussion questions on each week's readings.

Papers. You will complete four essays addressing different themes of the course as the required formal writing. The essays will be about five to eight pages in length and due different times during the semester. You will present an outline of your first paper and have the opportunity to rewrite your first three essays. Tentative titles for those papers are below.

Paper #1: What is a Sweatshop?

Paper #2: The Role of Sweatshops in the Global Garment Industry?

Paper #3: The Role of Sweatshops in this developing country?

Paper #4: What should we do about Sweatshops?

Oral Reports Each student will make a class presentation as part of a research team. You will present the results of your library study on working conditions and economic conditions in the clothing, footwear, and toy industries in various countries of the global economy. We organize teams of students by industry, country and corporation. You will develop an annotated bibliography of electronic and printed sources. You will present the class with copies of your annotated sources and a handout that summarizes your presentation.

Special Class Sessions

We will spend one class, October 19, learning the library skills that will help you complete the research for your class presentations. That class we will be held in the library. For another class meeting we will go on a field trip to Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

HELPFUL WEBSITE LOCATIONS

Bata Shoes 

A large Canadian owner manufacturer of shoes operating in Southeast Asia sited by non governmental organizations (NGOs) as a more responsible employer that pays a living wage and does not use subcontractors.

http://www.bata.com/main.html

Boycott Nike Homepage

Covers the Nike in Vietnam Story reported on CBS provides a report on the dangerous and abusive labor practice in the factories of Nike's subcontractors in Vietnam.

http://www.saigon.com//~nike/

Campaign For Labor Rights 

Mobilizes grassroots activism throughout the United States for a campaign to end sweatshop abuses and child labor. Large sections on Nike in Asia, Disney in Haiti, and sweatshops in Mexico and Central America.

http://www.summersault.com/~agl/cir/

Cleanclothes Campaign, Nike

A British website with updated reports on Nike in China.

http://cleanclothes.org/companies/nike.htm

Co-op America's solutions for a global economy: Sweatshops

A national non-profit education organization that works to promote a socially responsible market place.

http://www.sweatshops.org/

Cornell University, International Labor Relations School, Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Page

Contains pictures of and commentary on the fire and its aftermath.

http://IIr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/navigation.html

Corporate Watch

Bills itself as the watch dog of the web when it comes to corporate irresponsibility. Of interest are its Nike expose page and its newsletter Blood, Sweat, and Shears.

http://www.corpwatch.org/

Fair Labor Association

Garment Industry Association that emerged from a White House organized anti-sweatshop meeting. It members include Kathie Lee Gifford, Liz Claibome, Reebok, and other corporate giants and its fair labor guidelines demand that member corporations open their plants to inspection by external monitors and that members pay the prevailing minimum wage, not a living wage.

Fair Labor Standards Act Advisor

http://www.fairlabor.org

These standards emerged from the labor struggles of the 1930s arid the New Deal and were enacted in 1938. They include the minimum wage, time and a half for overtime, and the prohibition of homework and child labor.

http://www.dol.gov/eiaws/flsa.htm

Feminists Against Sweatshops

This feminist web site points out that women make up 90% of sweatshop laborers in the global economy. Their frequently asked questions section is especially helpful.

http://www.feminist.org/other/sweatshops.html

Global Exchange

One of two leading groups in the U.S. anti-sweatshop campaign. Their site contains information Of global economy as well as corporate reports such as Nike Update.

http://www.globalexchange.org/

Global Trade Watch

Part of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen devoted to promoting government and corporate accountability in the world economy

http://citizen.org/pctrde/tradehome.html

Inequality.org

A site managed by United For A Fair Economy contains the latest data on US inequality.

http://www.Inequality.org/ Index/html

International Labor Organization (ILO)

Official international labor and human rights organization known as the authors of International Labor Conventions and for its studies of the informal sector.

http://www.llo.org/public/english/Index.htm

Los Angeles Jewish Commission on Sweatshops

See their January 1999 report on Sweatshop in the LA. garment industry.

http://www.isber.ucsb.edu/CommonReport/html

Mattel's Corporate Responsibility Page

Mattel, the toy company, one of the largest contractors of toys producer in the developing world, recently published a study of conditions In the factories of their subcontractors.

http://www.mattel.com/corporate/company/responsibility/g mp.aBp/chapter=gmp

MSNBC TV News: Sweatshops: America's Labor Struggle

Assembled for their Dateline Program. See especially the undercover diary and timetable.

http://www.msnbc.com/onair/nbc/dateline/shop

National Labor Committee (NLC)

One of the two (along with Global Exchange) leading Human and Workers Rights organizations In the U.S. anti-sweatshop campaign. Headed by Charles Kemaghan, the NLC has conducted successful campaigns against Kathie Lee Gifford/WalMart and the Gap and has recently turned its attention to East Asia, especially China.

http://www.nlcnet.org/

NikeBiz/Labor index

Nike's social responsibility web page that contains: Nike's response to student protests, Nike's take on the labor conditions in its factories in China, and an explanation of Phil Knight's (the CEO) decision to no longer donate to the University of Oregon after it to joined the Worker's Rights Consortium.

http://www.nikebiz.com/Iabor/

Nikewatch: Are Nike Factories Sweatshops?

Sponsored by Community Aid Abroad, Oxfam, Australia, a complete website dedicated to a campaign to get Nike to upgrade its code of conduct.

http://www.caa.org.au/campaigns/nike/

Nike Workers Web Page

Site contains a study of wages paid workers in factories of Nike subcontractors in Indonesia and series of photos taken 'inside" factories producing Nikes in Indonesia.

http://www.nlkeworkers.org/

NO SWEAT - Help End Sweatshop Conditions

Department of Labor (DOL) antisweatshop page includes lists of corporations granted The DOL no sweat label. Uses the GAO definition of sweatshops.

http://www.dol.gov/dol/noswat.htm

Poverty Net: Resources to Support People Working to Understand and Alleviate Poverty

World Bank poverty page with data, interviews, and program descriptions.

http://www.worldbank.org/poverty/Index.htm

Reebok

One of the largest manufacturers of athletic footwear, regards itself as a model employer, and recently published a self-monitoring report on its subcontractors in Indonesia.

http://reebok.com/pedull/pedull.cfm

Rethinking Schools

Reports on its Summer 1997 Volume devoted to sweatshops. it includes helpful exercises and curriculum suggestions.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/Archives/11_04.htm

Smithsonian Institution Exhibit, Between A Rock and A hard Place:

The controversial Sweatshop in America exhibit of the Smithsonian containing long pieces on the history of U.S. sweatshops, the garment industry, and the El Monte case as well as the global production game.

http://www.americanhistory.sl.edu/sweatshops/Index.htm

Sweatshop Watch

A coalition of labor, community, civil rights, immigrant rights, women's, religious and student organizations and individuals committed to eliminating sweatshop conditions in the global garment industry. See What is a Sweatshop under garment industry.

http://www.sweatshopwatch.org

UNITE! Union Home Page

The Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees has taken a leading role among U.S. unions in the fight against sweatshops.

http://www.uniteunlon.org/Index.htm

United Nations Development Program (UNDP)

UN agency that publishes the Human Development Report and is know for its work on Global inequality by income, region, and gender.

http://www.undp.org/Indexalt.html

United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS)

An international coalition of students devoted to stopping sweatshop labor, It reports On the USAS-directed Sweat-FreeCampus Campaign which demands that colleges Initiate codes of conduct that go beyond the standards set by the Fair LaborAssociation.

http://home.sprintmall.com/~jeffnkarl/USA/ind

JOHN MILLER teaches economics and political economy at Wheaton College in Norton, MA and is a contributing editor to Dollars & Sense Magazine. He currently is completing a book manuscript, Which Way to Grow? Prosperity, Poverty, and Crisis in Southeast Asia, written with James Goodno.