Rethinking Globalization

	Members of Global Exchange protest Nike's overseas labor practices - photo: AP/Wide World Photos

Teaching and Organizing Against Sweatshops

By Bill Bigelow

Anyone who has tried to teach about globalization knows how daunting this can be. What is it? Where is it? The concept itself can overwhelm: It's everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time.

But ironically, the ubiquitous character of globalization may be just the thing that allows students to see its nature and to recognize ways that they can make a difference in the world.

This was brought home to me this summer while reading Liza Featherstone's book, Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002), a slender volume chronicling the origin and activities of United Students Against Sweatshops (www.usanet.org).

The book shows that because globalization is everywhere, it's also in school, and that fact offers students numerous opportunities to act for global justice and to make a difference in the lives of people halfway around the world. As Featherstone writes, "Universities' cozy ties to large companies are, paradoxically, a boon to the global economic justice movement because they bring corporatism into students' daily lives - and, perversely, lend students power as consumers in the 'academicindustrial complex.'" For example, Featherstone notes that students at the University of Oregon led a campus tour of various sites illustrating the university's many ties to corporations that exploited workers around the world - especially Nike, as exemplified in the Knight Library, named for billionaire Nike owner, Phil Knight. Students at Oregon and around the country have put Nike on the defensive and have forced the company to change in ways that it wouldn't have considered without such pressure.

Sodexho-Marriott is a French transnational that provides campus dining services. It also is a "notorious union buster," according to Featherstone, and was the largest investor in U.S. private prisons, where prisoners are exploited as cheap labor. Students at schools as diverse as Arizona State, University of Texas, Xavier, Florida State, SUNY-Binghampton, Fordham, American University, Evergreen State, and Oberlin protested these links, sometimes killing university contracts with Sodexho-Marriott. Ultimately, students forced the company to drop its holdings in Corrections Corporation of America.

Featherstone emphasizes that the source of students' activism is rooted not only in a desire to help others around the world, but also in an awareness of their own exploitation: "Young people were outraged on the workers' behalf, but they were also moved by a sense that their own desires were being manipulated, that the glamorous advertising aimed at youth markets was a cover-up meant to distract from corporate wrongdoings." As Pitzer College student and anti-sweatshop activist, Evelyn Zepeda, said, "We had been told we needed to buy these clothes to be sexy, to be popular... We felt used."

Although Featherstone's book focuses exclusively on university student activism, its stories, interviews and examples of activism are of interest to public school teachers and aspiring K- 12 student activists. They offer ideas for the kind of activism that students might engage in, but also can spark lesson ideas for teachers interested in teaching more about activism as an antidote to the despair that can descend on students as they learn about global crises, from AIDS to climate change.

Some teaching ideas that occurred to me while reading Students Against Sweatshops:

• Students could do a global corporation scavenger hunt, searching out the school's hidden connections with workers around the world. Where does the school's athletic equipment come from? Who makes it, under what conditions? Check out the student store. Where do those sweatshirts, T-shirts, and baseball caps come from? How about food in the school cafeteria? Do the bananas come from Ecuador, where workers are currently battling savage repression in order to secure rights to unionize? Who makes seniors' graduation gowns? (See Andrea Townsend's article "The Student Union vs. Jostens, Inc." for the story of how one group of students confronted their school's supplier of gowns..)
  
  
• Students could write each of the corporations involved in producing stuff their school uses. They could ask them a series of questions about the conditions under which the products were made and also ask for any codes of conduct that companies' subcontractors are supposed to adhere to. These may be posted at companies' websites.
  
  
• Students could contact the Workers Rights Consortium's website (www.workersrights.org) for an alternative code of conduct that students might compare with those of the companies they contacted. The WRC might put public school students in contact with university activists in their area who could compare notes and support each others' activities. If there are local Students Against Sweatshop chapters in your area, invite them in to talk about how they became activists and what they hope to accomplish.
  
  
• Like the activists at University of Oregon, students could lead globalization tours of the school, alerting other students and staff members to their hidden relationships with others around the world.
  
  
• Students could be encouraged to check out their textbooks. Who produces these and what else do they produce? For example, McDougall-Littell, a U.S. textbook publisher, is owned by Houghton Mifflin, which is owned by the giant French transnational, Vivendi Universal. One of its other divisions, Vivendi Environnement, is running around the world taking advantage of International Monetary Fund requirements that Third World countries privatize their water systems. Vivendi buys up water systems and then uses the "free market" to determine who will get water and for how much. Not surprisingly, the poor don't fare well in this resource auction. (CorpWatch has a valuable online guide to researching corporations. Visit their website (www.corpwatch.org), and click on the "Research" button at the top of their webpage.)

The point is simply that every time students enter school, they touch the lives of people around the world, and these relationships can become a topic of classroom inquiry. And since K-12 students are also consumers in a global "academic-industrial complex" this fact gives them some leverage they may not have realized that they had.

As Featherstone ably demonstrates, United Students Against Sweatshops is much more than a group of youngsters feeling sorry for poor people around the world. She shows how students are grappling with the difference between solidarity and charity, with their own "patriarchal and colonial attitudes towards garment workers" around the world, with manifestations of racism and class privilege in their own organization, and with strategic issues about whether to target corporations or the global capitalist system itself.

These mirror the issues that teachers also need to consider. Students Against Sweatshops is a small but valuable contribution to those of us attempting to construct curricula that teach honestly and deeply about today's world.

Bill Bigelow (bbpdx@aol.com) teaches at Franklin High School in Portland, Ore., and is an editor of Rethinking Schools. He and editor Bob Peterson also edited Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World.

The book Students Against Sweatshops is available from Teaching for Change: www.teachingforchange.org; 800-763-9131.

Fall 2002