2.4. Web Semántica
2.4.3. Estructura de la web semántica
Throughout history, industry has always rebelled against regulation. And so government and activists always have to push the tide back for more regulation. So when it comes to this outsourcing to factories abroad, we need to have a system where these western brands that are making all this profit aren’t just self- regulating, but that there’s actual accountability and traceability. Because at the end of the day, there’s a profound violation of human rights that needs to be accounted for. – Andrew Morgan, director of the upcoming documentary, The True Cost9
This section will interrogate the rise of sweatshops in the garment industry in the
twentieth century as a socio-cultural phenomenon that illustrates industry’s capacities to use fashion as a site for repeatable processes of labor exploitation. It will demonstrate the potential for, but complicated conditions of, resistance and disruption of these processes, which draws from some of the same cultural resources that enable industry exploitation. Workers have traditionally been threatened by the rise of Fordism – the industry’s ability to separate workers from each other to disrupt solidarity and to demean the laborer
9 (Dawisha, "The True Cost": A Documentary on the Global Fashion Industry's Impact, 2013)
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who has no ownership over the start to finish of making a product. This creates a discursive space where there is a struggle over meaning and values, such as
democratization and authenticity, which has been laid out in other chapters and will be further articulated here. This struggle is familiar to many industries, but labor
exploitation has always been the bedrock of the fashion industry in part because the softness of the fabric and intricacy of the patterns prevent easy mechanization, which is what allows other industries to keep costs low.10 Fashion provides an abundance of other cultural resources to inform the struggle (such as consumerism, novelty, ‘trends,’ and gendered labor) and capitalist governmentality is constantly employing these resources to reify industry power and a cycle of resistance and co-option.
Ultimately, what will be told in the following sections is the story of the rise of unions (and their eventual co-option) specifically in the United States; the rise again of sweatshops globally; the unleashing of branding and outsourcing as outcomes of discursive struggle accomplished through fashion’s cultural resources.11
In the fall of 1909 the women’s shirtwaist workers of Local 25 who led the largest industrial strike by women known at that time. Referred to as the “Uprising of 20,000,” twenty percent of its workforce walked out in protest over labor conditions and poor wages. Many of these young women were actually girls of fourteen or fifteen years of age.12 Their clear depiction of a dirty, dark workplace in which the ‘girls’ toiled for hours
with little break and pay shattered the popular illusion of the time, that of the Industrial
10 (Featherstone, 2002, 3)
11 (Featherstone & Sweatshops, 2002, 3) 12 (Ross R. J., 2004, 56)
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Revolution as being solely equated with progress and upward mobility. These young picketers garnered the crucial sympathy of middle and upper class women who were involved in the Women’s Trade Union League. A turning point occurred for the workers when these women joined the picketers and were arrested by the police. Media coverage changed and became more sympathetic, and public opinion shifted toward supporting the strikers. The actions of the women inspired the men’s strike consisting of sixty thousand cloakmakers, also known as the “Great Revolt.” Both of these strikes resulted in state intervention in labor rights, which included provisions for better pay, prohibition on ‘homework,’ and limits on hours worked per week. The women’s strike helped to initiate the making of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, while the men’s strike gave way to the Protocols of Peace.
These strikes in 1909-1910 helped to strengthen the ILGWU and ACWA (Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America) and increase its membership in the few years that followed. It also set the much-needed groundwork around labor exploitation that would help the public better understand just two years later what would become one of the deadliest industrial disasters in the U.S., the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
On March 25, 1911, a fire started on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, eventually killing 146 people, many of whom leapt to their deaths. It was discovered soon after that the back door had been locked, presumably to prevent union organizers from the outside to chat with workers in this nonunion factory.13 Ross writes in Slaves to Fashion,
13 (Ross R. J., 2004, 63)
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The Triangle Fire. It seems self-defining now: a firm of callous owners who had neglected fire equipment, who murderously allowed the back door to be locked, who employed children and worked their people seventy or eighty hours a week. The fire is a metaphor for the bad old days of sweatshops, a day we were to have overcome, a past whose horror only illumines the civilized nature of
contemporary life.14
Of course, history would repeat itself many times since that fateful day and into the next century. It was just in 2012, after all, that more than three hundred workers died in a factory fire in Pakistan, after factory employers locked the doors to prevent the workers from stealing the jeans they were making.15 Still, after 400,000 marchers protested in a
public funeral on April 5, 1911 and workers staged another public strike, the Factory Investigating Commission launched an investigation into worker conditions and proposed safety and wage regulations, including a minimum wage.16 World War I did indeed bring higher wages and employment to both garment workers and the rest of the nation, and union membership shot up to 129,000.
However, just as quickly as labor unions re-articulated the status quo to protect workers’ rights, those in power began the process of de-centralizing factory workplaces by creating the jobber-contractor-subcontractor system in the 1920s. Class theorists such as Marx and Braverman have argued that the compartmentalization of labor separates laborers from each other and disrupts worker solidarity. Braverman also argues that this division of labor only serves to demean the laborer, who no longer is able to gain
14 (Ross R. J., 2004, 62) 15 (Wand, 2012) 16 (Ross R. J., 2004, 67)
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ownership over a product by making it from start to finish.17 Indeed, the subcontracting
of work allowed New York manufacturers to evade the labor conditions determined by the union contract, and this growing industry decentralization even allowed some shops to leave the garment district where they could avoid union-friendly workers.18 A growing
“fashion consciousness” and consumer culture fueled by burgeoning mass media advertising further supported this decentralization.
The cultural and economic shifts that arose with Great Depression made it
increasingly difficult for labor unions to build on their union gains, as workers, struggling to find jobs, became more willing to accept exploitative working conditions. Prices inevitably dropped about 25 percent during the years from 1929 to 1933. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins noted this price decline as a troubling reflection of union losses when she stated: “The red silk bargain dress in the shop window is a danger signal. It is a warning of the return of the sweatshop, a challenge to us all to reinforce the gains we have made in our long and difficult progress toward a civilized industrial order.”19
Workers, faced with this loss of gains, began to push harder in leveraging their cultural resources to secure labor rights. Roosevelt’s presidential election and Frances Perkins’ (who had worked with the New York State Factory Investigating Commission) appointment as Secretary of Labor offered renewed hope, but it is important to emphasize that Roosevelt didn’t build structural reform out of the goodness of his heart. He was the owner class's designated negotiator when labor had the power to force compromise from
17 (Braverman, 1974) 18 (Ross R. J., 2004, 69) 19 (Ross R. J., 2004, 72)
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capital. Ultimately he passed two acts that would change the face of the industry – the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act) and the Fair Labor
Standards Act. The NLRA, passed in 1935, guaranteed the basic right of workers to join a union, bargain for better conditions, and strike if necessary. The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 1938, mandated a forty-hour workweek, a national minimum wage, the prohibition of most forms of child labor, and the guarantee of time and a half for overtime.20
Thus began the so-called “era of decency,” the period between the 1940s and 1970s in which labor rights were strong and sweatshops were generally regarded as a thing of the past. Even though there is some evidence that the ILGWU did not fight so aggressively for collective bargaining on behalf of Puerto Rican and African American workers, even then, the wages and conditions of these workers did not fall below minimum wage and did not meet what was then defined as a sweatshop.21
This began to drastically shift starting in the second half of the twentieth century, when an aggregate of several troubling cultural and economic trends emerged that would give way, once again, to the rise of the sweatshop. Many prominent apparel companies, as a way to avoid the extra costs that union factories required to make improvements, began to relocate production to the union-weak southern states starting in the 1950s and even Asia, where production was significantly cheaper than in the United States, and where governments were quick to shut down union organizing.22 The decline of
20 (Samuel, 2000)
21 (Ross R. J., 2004, 94) 22 (Williams, 2010, 44)
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communication and transportation costs in the 1960s hastened this trend.23 Trade
agreements such as the Multifiber Arrangements (1974-2004) that set export quotas for different countries were ultimately weak protectionist measures however, and apparel imports to the U.S. increased steadily over the next few decades.24 The final nail in the
coffin was when the World Trade Agreement was created in 1994, ensuring that the quotas of the Multifiber Arrangement would be gradually phased out over the next ten years so that by 2004, any country could export apparel in unlimited amounts to the U.S.25
How is it that just fifty years after the radical changes brought by the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire to protect worker and union rights, these gains were wrestled away? The promotion of neoliberal, ‘free trade’ policies that emerged out of “deliberate policy decisions by elites across the globe,” initiated during the Reagan and Bush
administrations and strengthened by the Clinton administration, is at the root of this shift.26 Distinguished by its rhetoric that focuses on ‘free trade’ and deregulation,
neoliberalism ultimately reorients the economic regulatory system in a way that benefits multinational corporations at the expense of collective labor organized by vulnerable groups. It is characterized by deregulation, ‘cost-cutting’ and privatization. Deregulation
23 (Featherstone, 2002, 4)
24 (Williams, 2010, 45-46) 25 (Williams, 2010, 51) 26 (Williams, 2010, 48)
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is defined as an intentional policy by which industry is left to market forces, while privatization transfers public, government goods and services into private ones.27
These new systems of power cleverly employed the discourses of globalization to promote poverty reduction and class equalization, and yet globalization embedded in neoliberal policies has not delivered on its equalizing promises. Between 1960 and 1993, for example, the gap in per capita income between the Global North and Global South tripled.28 Outsourcing to other countries led to a weakening in domestic production in the United States and ultimately, union membership and strength. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals the decrease in union membership has paralleled the decline in worker’s wages in the apparel industry. For example, as of 2000, wages for garment workers fell to about 55% of the average manufacturing wage, and apparel workers brought home less than four percent more in real purchasing power from 1988 to 2000.29 It is this destruction of union power that can help explain why the labor exploitation in the beginning of the twenty-first century mirrored the exploitation in the beginning of the twentieth.
These neoliberal policies have contributed significantly to the rise of the
sweatshop, a word that has metaphorically come to symbolize degrading and exploitative working conditions that are so inconceivable they are perceived to be archaic, a thing of the past. Unfortunately, sweatshops are very much an integral part of our current day reality, in large part due to the cost-reduction strategies of multinationals that fosters a
27 (Ross R. J., 2004, 150) 28 (Featherstone, 2002, viii) 29 (Ross R. J., 2004, 204-205)
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“race to the bottom,” in which governments lower their labor, environmental and consumer standards in order to attract investors. These governments are aware that corporations will quickly desert their countries if lower-wage ones become available as “export platforms.”30 So low prices in the garment industry become the country’s best
selling point in the global economy. This leads to suppliers cutting their prices at the expense of their workers, who are paid poverty wages and made to work excessive hours. Similar to what was seen I the turn of the century, workers in the garment industry are generally young women, aged sixteen to twenty-two years old, who have traveled to the cities from rural areas and are without their families, making them especially
vulnerable.31 They are frequently subjected to gendered forms of abuse, such as forced pregnancy tests and birth control in an effort to halt their menstrual cycles.32
One would think that with such rampant exploitation in the fashion industry, both domestically and abroad, more people would rise up to protest its attendant abuses. And yet, as Naomi Klein argues in her book No Logo, the rise of an increasingly branded and corporatized world gives fashion yet another cultural resource by which they can hijack any potential resistance movements. Brands and logos have taken up so much cultural and economic space, including school curricula, neighborhoods, and all-encompassing infotainment malls like Virgin Megastores, that challenging that hegemony seems to be almost an impossible task.
30 (Ross R. J., 2004, 105) 31 (Ngai, 2006)
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Of course, for discount retailers such as Wal-Mart, the discourse of
democratization, which perpetuates the idea that the giant retailer is offering dirt-cheap prices so that poorer people can have easier access to fashionable goods, allows Wal- Mart to evade accountability for paying its workers so little. Of course, when workers are paid such a fraction of the retail price raising their wages would probably not effect the total price significantly. One need look no further than Costco, a cheap discounter that pays its workers a living wage and has soared in earnings in recent years.33 Still, WalMart is such a powerful multi-billion dollar global brand that contractors are simply not in any kind of structural position to raise their workers wages and improve factory conditions. Ultimately it is the brand that dictates pricing and supply and thus, power is with the brand to change how business is done and how workers are treated in global commodity chains. Thus anti-sweatshop activists, as the next section will reveal, knew that to make any kind of leverage they would have to both target the brand-name
companies, and their logos, that dominate the global commodity chain as well as attempt to shift power in a way that would once again centralize workers’ rights and organizing. III. Advocacy Strategies against Sweatshops: Using the resources of neoliberal capital to hold industry accountable
Anti-corporate activism certainly didn’t begin in the 1990s, as Klein concedes in No Logo. However, the year 1995, dubbed the ‘year of the sweatshop,’ marked the cultural moment that a true movement began to form, and there was a ‘collective click’ on the part of media and the public. It was then that an aggregate of horror stories and public relations disasters - from the Kader toy factory fire in Bangkok, to the images of
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Chinese prison labor, to child activists Craig Kielburger and Iqbal Masih speaking out against child labor, to the Kathy Gifford fiasco – that there was a cultural shift in how people viewed workers in the Global South. Klein attributes this to a kind of chance, but also, to a collective resistance against the 90s brand, which she noted had “grown so dominant that they have essentially transformed the clothing on which they appear into empty carriers for the brands they represent.”34 Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor
Committee recognized that if he was going to be able to launch an effective counter- strategy against sweatshops, he needed to bypass complicated laws and governmental policies and instead focus on the logos that had become so intertwined in the lives of American citizens. The film, “Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti” produced by the National Labor Committee, was an arresting visualization of a seemingly whimsical company’s exploitation of women garment workers in Haiti. The film was screened widely on campuses and helped to spark a student anti-sweatshop movement.
Kernaghan’s tactics – using capital’s popular logos against it -had its detractors, most notably from retailers, even those seemingly interested in tackling sweatshops. Regardless, Kernaghan was effective in gaining the attention from the media and helping to spark change in the industry. Still, the backlash he received does reveal the tensions in differing ‘advocacy’ strategies, which we will explore later in the chapter in detail.
This chapter will turn to consider eight exemplars employed to increase industry accountability before turning to some of the problematics in thinking about the likelihood of progress into the future. My intent is not to provide a ‘victory narrative’ but rather, to locate how different modes of thought become dominant discourses.
34 (Klein, 2000, 28)
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A. United Students Against Sweatshops: Fighting Unsafe and Unfair Labor Conditions