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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Global Solidarity, Global Worker Empowerment, And Global Strategy In The Anti-Sweatshop Movement, Matthew S. Williams
Global Solidarity, Global Worker Empowerment, And Global Strategy In The Anti-Sweatshop Movement, Matthew S. Williams
Sociology: Faculty Publications and Other Works
I explore the ideology of worker empowerment among U.S. anti-sweatshop activists, particularly United Students Against Sweatshops, and its strategic consequences for transnational campaigns. This ideology is central in shaping the movement’s transnational strategy and organization, fostering communication and accountability, particularly to organizations representing sweatshop workers. Such organizational choices, in turn, shape how transnational networks strategize. For example, the anti-sweatshop movement rarely uses the familiar tactic of boycotts, due to opposition from workers. The more empowered sweatshop workers in such networks, the more informed decisions their allies can make, and the more strategically effective the movement can be.
How College Students Created Opportunities For Sweatshop Workers: The Anti-Sweatshop Movement And An Interactive Approach To Political Opportunity Structure, Matthew Williams
How College Students Created Opportunities For Sweatshop Workers: The Anti-Sweatshop Movement And An Interactive Approach To Political Opportunity Structure, Matthew Williams
Sociology: Faculty Publications and Other Works
Political opportunity structure (POS) refers to how the larger social context, such as repression, shapes a social movement's chances of success. Most work on POS looks at how movements deal with the political opportunities enabling and/or constraining them. This article looks at how one group of social movement actors operating in a more open POS alters the POS for a different group of actors in a more repressive environment through a chain of indirect leverage—how United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) uses the more open POS on college campuses to create new opportunities for workers in sweatshop factories. USAS exerts …