Book Review: Strategizing Against Sweatshops: The Global Economy, Student Activism, and Worker Empowerment by Williams, Matthew

Abstract

Strategizing Against Sweatshops: The Global Economy, Student Activism, and Worker Empowerment is an analytic examination of the strategic evolution of the U.S. antisweatshop movement, United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). A sociologist at Loyola University Chicago, author Matthew Williams’s primary goal is to uncover the processes of strategic decision-making and understand why movement activists make the choices they do. His book, the product of Williams’s doctoral dissertation, uses the ethnographic method and 30 in-depth interviews to reconstruct the history of the USAS. Williams’s introduction reviews existing scholarship and sets out his approach. The author builds on previous scholarship on social movements to explore how antisweatshop movements develop their strategic models. To uncover how movements operate within particular social environments and identify possible points of leverage, Williams expands the understanding of political opportunity structures (POS) from a traditional focus on the state to encompass social structures, cultural factors, and nonmovement social actors. Part I contextualizes the emergence of student anti-sweatshop activism in the mid-1990s. Williams identifies two key structures: one, the international apparel industry, shaped by the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and the rise of outsourcing, and, two, U.S. college campuses, where college administrations sought to maintain legitimacy amidst growing corporatization. Understanding these structures proved essential in shaping the concrete goals, strategies, and possibilities of student activism. Part II provides a detailed examination of the USAS’s origins, organization, and ideology. Drawing from participant accounts, Williams identifies how the USAS developed from a dispersed, localized, and often nonstrategic student anti-sweatshop movement to become the leader of a global movement coalition. Two strategic collaborations were crucial in this development. First, collaboration with UNITE, the U.S.-based national apparel union, helped activists develop coherent campaign strategies and transmitted worker empowerment as central to the success of any antiBook Reviews