No Sweat!

The British anti-sweatshop campaign, began life as a national network a little under three years ago. During those three years the organisation has extended the breadth and scale of its work, which has included drives against sweatshop bosses abroad and in the UK.

Five national trade unions and the National Union of Students are now affiliated and No Sweat continues to grow, week by week.

No Sweat’s structures are open and flexible — capable of allowing Trotskyists, anarchists, Labour Party leftists, trade union militants and activists from various other backgrounds to work together for common goals.

The No Sweat project has a number of interesting aspects. First, it can act as a bridge between the post-Seattle anti-capitalist movement and those involved in NGO politics, and the trade unions. The unions can benefit from the life, vitality and energy of the new protest movements. And the anti-capitalists and fair traders can learn some political lessons from involvement in joint-campaigning alongside trade unionists — the centrality of class and the potential power of workers.

So, for example, in 2002 No Sweat linked up with the GMB London region to campaign against the sweatshop bosses of Whitechapel, east London, in a campaign that exposed gross exploitation in the heart of London’s rag trade. The scandal of illegally low-paid workers producing for big names on Oxford Street was splashed across the front cover and inside pages of the London Evening Standard; many of the workers ended up with significant pay rises and improvements to health and safety.

No Sweat’s appeal is wide and vast. People come towards No Sweat for the same sort of reasons that they join Oxfam, People and Planet, and Christian Aid: the world is vicious and unfair, and is carved up by transnationals and governments that rig trade rules and work for the rich and powerful. Brands and logos, forced on us by TV and the advertising industry, are symbols of this and of the way the world is, and rightly disgust thousands of young people.

No Sweat is able to focus some of this discontent and give it a framework.

In the first instance that framework is ideological, not organisational. What No Sweat offers is a particular way of approaching such questions — unlike the mainstream NGOs, No Sweat thinks class is central.

And No Sweat can break that idea down. No Sweat can take a gut disgust — perhaps against the way Nike behaves (paying vast sums to its CEO, Phil Knight, and various celebrity sportspeople, while paying workers who make its running shoes a pittance) — and use it as a concrete example.

Who can deal with Nike? We have a specific answer: our friends in the FNPBI trade union in Indonesia organise in Nike plants. Help them. The independent unions, organised on the ground, are the very best weapon workers have against being abused at work.

And our support is more than support on paper. No Sweat organises practical events and stunts to help press the workers’ case. We have held protests, stunts and demonstrations in defence of Indonesian, Iraqi, Mexican, Haitian and other groups of sweatshop workers. And we have raised money for their organisations, and fixed speaker tours for their representatives.

These direct links can be very important factors as struggles unfold. For example, in 2002 we organised a visit of two Mexican worker activists from Puebla in central Mexico. One of the workers, Josefina Hernandez, had been central to the fight against Nike and local management at the Kuk Dong factory, where the workers had won a ground-breaking victory and built an independent union in a maquila (production for export) factory.

When the Puebla workers began to spread the fight for union rights in 2003 we were on hand to help a massive international solidarity effort. Later that year a No Sweat delegation visited central Mexico, and the bonds we have formed with the local activists will exist for years to come.

In 2004 it is hard for young people disillusioned or disgusted with the world, and attempting to enter politics, to see either the point or the possibility of workers’ action.

We are living in a world where the Marxist project of working class power through workers’ self-emancipation has been heavily discredited, primarily by the disaster of Stalinism. Moreover, battles where large groups of British workers have taken significant, aggressive industrial action have been few since the end of the 1980s.

And the easily available radical organisations young people might have joined 20 years ago — Labour Party Young Socialists, Labour Students, or Youth CND — have gone.

By touring Britain with Mexican, Haitian or Indonesian union militants we are also bringing the message that workers’ direct action struggles can and do work. We are saying: listen to these people and how they have fought and won.

The Blogs on this site represent the individual views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or practices of the National Union of Students.

All links in blogs will open in a new browser window.

The permanent URL for this specific blog entry is: http://www.officeronline.co.uk/blogs/alanclarke/270456.aspx