> I signed one of the posts under my own name today when I asked
>someone to push the issue of why in their coverage of UNITE Doug and
>Liza did not mention its successful campaigns to deny Cambodia a
>quota increase and load the African Trade Bill with several
>protectionist measures. After all, when I was on this list, I had
>spent considerable time raising questions about this. But it seems I
>wasted my time.
The "coverage" of UNITE consists of this:
>Sweatshops are a global issue, but for student activists an obvious
>target lies close at hand: the hats, sweatshirts, and other items
>emblazoned with university logos. After a summer internship with the
>United Needle and Textile Workers Union (UNITE) in 1997, Tico
>Almeida, then an undergraduate at Duke University, pressed Duke to
>pass a code of conduct that would require manufacturers of its
>apparel to maintain safe, independently monitored workplaces in
>which workers were free to organize. Fellow Duke students were
>enthusiastic and began lobbying administrators aggressively. They
>succeeded in getting Duke to enact their code, and the victory
>inspired students on other campuses to begin similar campaigns.
and
>Another sociologist, Peter Dreier, director of Occidental College's
>Urban & Environmental Policy Program, advises student activists and
>has taught a seminar on the sweatshop issue. With Occidental
>activists, Dreier pressed administrators to commission an Occidental
>T-shirt made by UNITE members in Pennsylvania. Though some activists
>have criticized this strategy as protectionist, Dreier believes that
>the union label provides the best available insurance that apparel
>is "sweat-free."
Denouncing UNITE's position on Cambodia would have been a little off-track.
Apparently Rakesh gets most of his information on trade policy from the bourgeois press and economists like Desai and Bhagwati whose origins are in the "Third World" but who have been thoroughly bourgeoisified. Desai is a member of the House of Lords, for heaven's sake; the British state is not known for honoring the enemies of metropolitan capital. Rakesh's arguments on trade sound indistinguishable from the neoliberal WTO delegates from the "developing" world.
U.S. textile and apparel workers, who are dwindling in number, are at the bottom end of the U.S. pay scale. Of textile workers, half are women, and almost a third are black or Hispanic; of (legal) apparel workers, two thirds are women, and almost a half are black or Hispanic. Casting them as some kind of labor aristocracy is rather hideous.
I've certainly been plenty critical of U.S. labor's nationalist/protectionist streak, though I've been happy to see a bit of a move towards some internationalism over the last few years. Rakesh seems absolutely incapable of acknowledging the contradictory nature of American organized labor, though he's perfectly willing to talk positively about the benefits of trade liberalization. He, like the bourgeois economists he relies on, also seems to think the student anti-sweatshop movement is protectionist, when it's quite consciously and explicitly not protectionist (and also quite opposed to boycotts).
At its best, the anti-sweatshop movement is a real instance of cross-border solidarity of a new type, so Rakesh's critique mystifies me. Maybe it's an instance of what Adolph Reed referred to recently as "the kind of contrarian ultraleftism that I associate with a flavor of sectarianism: you know, the impulse to find a deep, immoral reactionary foundation in any actual mobilization."
Doug