Students Against Sweatshops: The Making of a Movement [Paperback]

United Students Against Sweatshops (Author), Liza Featherstone (Author), Molly McGrath (Foreword), United Students Against Sweatshops (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2002

This short, punchy, yet sharply analytic book, written by USAS activists and an expert journalist, provides a record of a new mass campaign and a tool for the realization of its goals.

United Students Against Sweatshops heads a wave of anti-sweatshop organizing that has reached over two hundred American college campuses in the past four years. From the northeast to the southwest, at public and private, large and small universities, their campaigns have wreaked havoc on the corporate campus and ruffled multinational companies whose profits depend on young consumers; they have also led to a more broadly based engagement with issues of social justice and provide a potential model for transnational student/worker solidarity.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

New York City journalist Featherstone and the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) have collaborated to write a brief history of university student anti-sweatshop activism and the role of USAS. The organization began in spring 1998 as a coalition of student groups "fighting for sweatshop-free working conditions and workers' rights." USAS now has over 200 chapters on university campuses throughout the world working to ensure that clothing bearing university logos is produced by companies offering a living wage and fair working conditions in their factories. This book includes a time line, a listing of university chapters, and notes on contributors. Each chapter contains vignettes by student USAS members and some factory workers offering a personal look into working conditions and the group's campaigns. Because it is written strictly from the USAS viewpoint, this book is limited in its ability to offer a larger treatment of the world problem of garment factory sweatshops conditions and workers' rights. Academic libraries having a USAS chapter could consider purchasing, while other libraries may want to wait for a more rounded approach to this topic. Joyce M. Cox, Nevada State Lib. & Archives, Reno
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

On college campuses across the country over the last four years, a rising tide of student activism has been targeting Nike, Gap, and other global corporations, demanding that clothing be produced under healthy, safe, and fair working conditions. This small book combines a general overview about the United Students against Sweatshops (USAS)--who they are, how they organize, their issues, political strategies, allies, etc.--with profiles of particular leaders, activists, and sweatshop workers. The style is somewhat scattered, combining articles, newspaper reports, and interviews, but the format does convey an urgent sense of reporting from the front lines. There's interesting discussion of USAS' origin in privileged rich kids fighting for faraway poor people, and the need to find common ground with those opposing racism and sexism here and abroad. Best of all are the lively individual stories, from the activist on the Nike Truth Tour who calls himself "a recovering punk rocker," to the Mexican factory worker who fights the sweatshop conditions even as she welcomes her job as a way out of patriarchal oppression. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Verso (June 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859843026
• ISBN-13: 978-1859843024
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #105,140 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Even if you think you know........, June 7, 2002

By 

Ron Hayduk (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Students Against Sweatshops: The Making of a Movement (Paperback)

What is the Anti-Sweatshop Movement? How to work for social justice? This compact and highly readible book is filled with a wealth of information and workable strategies. Written by an incisive and expert author/journalist, Liza Featherstone, and voices of USAS activists in the movement from across the U.S, they address these pressing questions.

The book presents a nicely woven analysis and plenty of concrete and heart wrentching examples that amply illustrate what kind of plague global corporate dynamics are imposing on much of the world, and, most importantly, what to do about it. The book describes who is the USAS and what they are all about, how they are fighting back and making significant gains, and how to plug in. The author (and the USAS) does not flinch from grappling with complex issues: how to do local work and link it to powerful global dynamics and actors; how to draw upon past activism and how to move beyond it; how to deal with thorny issues--such as racial dynmanics, ideology, and other potentially divisive issues in any movement--as they play out in the USAS.

In short, this is a must read for anyone interested in the forces and faces changing our world today.

BUY IT NOW!!