Barbara
Rimml
Labour conflicts in the world factories of the garment industry
and International Solidarity Campaigns. An evaluation of the
Clean Clothes Campaign's Urgent Appeals.
Nov 2003 - The clothing industry gives an illustrative example
of economic globalization. Labour-intensive production processes
were relocated from industrialized to developing countries since
the late 1960s, and today, the largest part of the production
is accomplished in developing countries, especially in Asia.
Around two third of the global workforce in the clothing industry
are young women.
The main characteristics of this employment are its geographical
instability and the shift from production in the formal to the
informal sector and homework, where conditions at work and labour
right violations are worst and workers less protected than in
the formal sector. But also in the formal sector, violations
of worker rights are common: wages below subsistence level,
long working hours and forced overtime, discrimination of women
and migrant workers, and most of all, violations of the workers
fundamental rights to freedom of association and collective
bargaining.
But the race to the bottom of social standards has also mobilized
resistance. In the 1990s, a global movement arose. Many heterogeneous
groups are cooperating in the form of international networks,
and they often use the Internet to exchange information and
mobilize for actions. One of such networks is the Clean Clothes
Campaign (CCC), which was founded in 1990 in the Netherlands
and has become active in more than 10 other European countries
during the 1990s. In cases of urgent labour conflicts in clothing
factories, the CCC sends information and requests for action
(Urgent Appeals) to the international networks. Activists all
over the world are asked to send protest letters to the factory
owner, the government and the transnational corporations who
have subcontracted to the factory in question. The idea of such
campaigns is to build up international pressure that forces
the targeted parties to intervene and to see that the rights
of the workers are respected.
This book consists of an evaluation of such campaigns. Did
the labour disputes supported by international pressure end
in a success or not? Besides giving an overview on the different
cases (summaries, statistics, conflict types), successful and
unsuccessful cases and their impact on the targeted parties
are compared in order to find out why some campaigns were successful
and others not.
o Barbara Rimml. Lic. rer. soc. Studies of sociology, ecology,
marketing and mass media.
214 pages - ISBN:3-9522100-7-2
More info on: http://www.soz.unibe.ch/nbb/rimml.asp
