Unraveling the Garment Industry: Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work (Volume 27) (Social Movements, Protest and Contention)

Unraveling the Garment Industry is an ambitious investigation of the politics of labor and protest within an industry that has come to define the possibilities and abuses of globalization and its feminized labor: the garment industry. Focusing on three labor rights movements—against GAP clothing in El Salvador, child labor in Bangladesh, and sweatshops in New York City—Ethel C. Brooks examines how transnational consumer protest campaigns effect change, sometimes with unplanned penalties for those they intend to protect. Brooks analyzes a two-pronged problem in consumer boycott campaigns against labor abuse in the garment industry. First, how are we to understand the political necessities of local protest such as the right to unionize against the emphasis placed on consumer boycotts? Second, what and whose agency is privileged or obscured within the symbolic economies and the politics of information deployed by these campaigns? Tying both of these questions together is a commitment to seeing globalization as embedded in the everyday realities of the local. Drawing attention to the race, class, and gender assumptions central to powerful consumer boycotts, Brooks reveals how these movements unintentionally reinforce the global economic forces they denounce. Ethel C. Brooks is assistant professor of women’s and gender studies and sociology at Rutgers University. Taking an ethnographic approach to the topic, Brooks analyzes the logic, origins, objectives, and consequences of three transnational consumer-oriented protest campaigns against abusive labor practices in the globalized garment manufacturing industry. Throughout her analysis is the idea of women's bodies as central to production, consumption, and protest. Other issues explored include agency and citizenship in a US-sponsored campaign against child labor in Bangladesh; the possibilities of transnational labor organizing in the wake of the 1980s civil war in El Salvador; symbolic politics of gender, race, class, and celebrity in a union protest campaign against Wal-Mart subcontractors; and labor regulation and discipline on the factory floor and in protest campaigns Contents......Page 8 List of Acronyms......Page 10 Introduction......Page 14 1. Children, Schools, and Labored Questions......Page 36 2. Organizing in Times of (Post)War......Page 61 3. The Ideal of Transnational Organizing......Page 89 4. Disciplining Bodies......Page 117 5. Women First?......Page 149 6. Living Proof......Page 173 Epilogue: Gender and the Work of Branding......Page 198 Acknowledgments......Page 208 Notes......Page 212 Bibliography......Page 238 A......Page 254 B......Page 255 C......Page 257 E......Page 260 F......Page 261 G......Page 262 H......Page 264 I......Page 265 L......Page 266 M......Page 267 N......Page 269 P......Page 270 R......Page 271 S......Page 272 T......Page 274 U......Page 275 V......Page 276 W......Page 277 Z......Page 278 Unraveling the Garment Industry investigates the politics of labor and protest within the garment industry. Focusing on three labor rights movementsÑagainst GAP clothing in El Salvador, child labor in Bangladesh, and sweatshops in New York CityÑEthel C. Brooks examines how transnational consumer protest campaigns effect change, sometimes with unplanned penalties for those they intend to protect List of acronyms Introduction Children, schools, and labored questions Organizing in times of (post)war The ideal of transnational organizing Disciplining bodies Women first? Living proof Epilogue: gender and the work of branding Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index.