Locating the Publicity of US-Based Anti-Sweatshop Activism

摘要

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the protestors at the World Trade Organization (WTO) Third Ministerial Conference in Seattle towards the end of 1999 was to bring the debate about the regulation of economic globalization into the mainstream public forum of the United States. However, the voices raised against the WTO in the streets of Seattle were hardly representative of the global community. Where are the problems? What are the issues? How should we fix them? Some people from developing countries, such as the group quoted above, have already framed the issues and what they had to say did not necessarily agree with what the street protestors were demanding. How and where should economic globalization be regulated? The publicity in Seattle belied the variety of answers. Tied to this recent attention to processes of globalization is the rapid growth of the anti-sweatshop movement on college campuses in the United States (see http://www.workersrights.org/or http://www. usasnet.org/). Impressively, action has followed the awareness that the protestors in Seattle generated. However, this resurgent activism in the United States is the latecomer to the overall debate concerning the regulation of economic globalization. I am concerned that US-based resistance such as the anti-sweatshop movement fails to attend to the groups and citizens in developing countries who had been protesting neo-liberal economic globalization long before the Battle in Seattle.