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Liesbeth Sluiter, Clean Clothes: A Global Movement to End Sweatshops (London: Pluto Press 2009)
Of all the global justice movements over the past twenty years, the anti-sweatshop movement best exemplifies popular transnational resistance to neoliberal attempts to impose 19th century forms of class domination on the world's workers. And if any one industry best exemplifies the global 'race to the bottom' in labour standards through the dynamics of competitive labour markets and the manifold cultures of patriarchy, it is the global garment industry. The story of Europe's innovative and biggest anti-sweatshop network in Liesbeth Sluiter's Clean Clothes provides a timely assessment of the Clean Clothes Campaign and introduces us to key debates about where the global anti-sweatshop movement might be heading.
Originating in the Netherlands at the start of the 1990s, the Clean Clothes Campaign has grown into a loose, cooperative network of nationally based organizations in Europe, with links to labour organizations, ngos and anti-sweatshop activists around the world. The ccc's origins reflect the end of the Cold War and the turn to US-led global neoliberalism. It was a response to, and mirrored, the rise of a more networked corporate model able to coordinate global production chains, thanks to innovations in communications and transportation technology. Like other ngos and networks without borders which grew up in the 1990s, it is a child of the internet.
The ccc, like the global anti sweatshop movement generally, was also built on new identities, particularly among Northern youth who intuited new forms of global citizenship. The ccc was, from the outset, internationalist. As Sluiter reports, ccc activists are committed to overcoming consumer-producer and North-South divides. Although child labour has motivated popular outrage in the North against garment sweatshops, the underlying issue is the need to eliminate Northern employers' escape from labour rights enforcement, particularly freedom of association and collective bargaining, in anti-labour regimes in the South.
A central theme of Clean Clothes is the gendered nature of garment sweatshops. Sluiter estimates that 84 per cent of the workers in the global clothing and sports shoe industry are women,...