Clean Clothes: A Global Movement to End Sweatshops (review)

Of all the global justice movements over the past twenty years, the anti-sweatshop movement best exemplifies popular transnational resistance to neoliberal attempts to impose 19th century forms of class domination on the world’s workers. And if any one industry best exemplifies the global ‘race to the bottom’ in labour standards through the dynamics of competitive labour markets and the manifold cultures of patriarchy, it is the global garment industry. The story of Europe’s innovative and biggest anti-sweatshop network in Liesbeth Sluiter’s Clean Clothes provides a timely assessment of the Clean Clothes Campaign and introduces us to key debates about where the global anti-sweatshop movement might be heading.

Originating in the Netherlands at the start of the 1990s, the Clean Clothes Campaign has grown into a loose, cooperative network of nationally based organizations in Europe, with links to labour organizations, ngos and anti-sweatshop activists around the world. The ccc’s origins reflect the end of the Cold War and the turn to US-led global neoliberalism. It was a response to, and mirrored, the rise of a more networked corporate model able to coordinate global production chains, thanks to innovations in communications and transportation technology. Like other ngos and networks without borders which grew up in the 1990s, it is a child of the internet.

The ccc, like the global anti sweatshop movement generally, was also built on new identities, particularly among Northern youth who intuited new forms of global citizenship. The ccc was, from the out-set, internationalist. As Sluiter reports, ccc activists are committed to overcoming consumer-producer and North-South divides. Although child labour has motivated popular outrage in the North against garment sweatshops, the underlying issue is the need to eliminate Northern employers’ escape from labour rights enforcement, particularly freedom of association and collective bargaining, in anti-labour regimes in the South.

A central theme of Clean Clothes is the gendered nature of garment sweatshops. Sluiter estimates that 84 per cent of the workers in the global clothing and sports shoe industry are women, some 30–40 million women worldwide. They are mostly young, poor, and poorly educated. Many are migrants from rural areas to urban industrial areas in countries such as China, India, Vietnam, and Cambodia. In addition to low pay, long hours, and precarious jobs as workers, they suffer as

women whose children sleep beneath the sewing machine and begin to help out as soon as their fingers can manage to thread a needle; women who wear nothing but black clothes to work when menstruating, because toilet visits are restricted and stains on their clothes will shame them; pregnant women who stand all day; women who are sexually harassed and psychologically intimidated; women who get paid less than men for the same job; women who have to leave their babies with parents far away.

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Much of the book is devoted to assessing the gains and failures of two decades of anti-sweatshop activism. Sluiter provides readers with ccc leaders’ own views of their activities. This includes attempts to encourage public institutions in Europe to buy “fair wear” uniforms for their employees. Much of these activists’ efforts have focused on “urgent appeal campaigns” to support Southern workers and to inform Northern publics about injustices and production conditions. Some of these campaigns succeeded. For example, when a Taiwanese firm fired union leaders at one of its plants in Nicaragua, an international solidarity campaign by workers at the firm’s subsidiary in Lesotho, labour activists in Taiwan and the US, and the ccc, and a court ruling in favour of the fired workers led to them being rehired. The ccc has also been central to international sportswear campaigns, particularly in relation to the Olympic Games and to the European and world soccer championships. And the ccc continues to pressure European governments to adopt legal frameworks to make transnational retailers accountable for labour standards in their global production chains.

The ccc has had important successes over the past two decades, but...