Temple University Press, 2020
For the past few decades, the U.S. anti-sweatshop movement was bolstered by actions from American college students. United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) effectively advanced the cause of workers’ rights in sweatshops around the world. Strategizing against Sweatshops chronicles the evolution of student activism and presents an innovative model of how college campuses are a critical site for the advancement of global social justice.
I show how USAS targeted apparel companies outsourcing production to sweatshop factories with weak or non-existent unions. USAS did so by developing a campaign that would support workers organizing by leveraging their college’s partnerships with global apparel firms like Nike and Adidas to abide by pro-labor codes of conduct.
Strategizing against Sweatshops exemplifies how organizations and actors cooperate across a movement to formulate a coherent strategy responsive to the conditions in their social environment. I also provide a model of political opportunity structure to show how social context shapes the chances of a movement’s success—and how movements can change that political opportunity structure in turn. Ultimately, I show why progressive student activism remains important.
Journal Articles
In my academic journal articles, I seek not only to engage in sociological analysis, but to do work that illuminates issues related to movement-building, movement strategy, policy-making, and other aspects of working for social change.
Because most academic journal articles are published behind paywalls, I have included links both to the official publication and publicly available preprint versions.
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Two major anti-sweatshop groups—United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and SweatFree Communities—pursued similar goals in different social arenas: college campuses and city governments. This article examines their shared strategy of gradual escalation, demonstrating how social movements must balance coercion and consent to effectively pressure authorities. Both groups aimed to enforce pro-labor rights codes for apparel industry partners, using distinct yet escalating strategies. USAS employed extra-institutional tactics like sit-ins and hunger strikes, while SweatFree Communities leveraged electoral politics. Both began with awareness-raising efforts, such as teach-ins and film screenings, before escalating to coercive tactics—protests and sit-ins for USAS and mobilizing key voting blocs for SweatFree Communities. Despite operating in different arenas, both groups followed a pattern of building legitimacy before applying structural power.
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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 direct leverage over college administrators through protests, pushing them to exert leverage over major apparel companies through the licensing agreements schools have with these companies.
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I explore the ideology of worker empowerment among US 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 at in such networks, the more informed decisions their allies can make, and the more strategically effective the movement can be.
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In this paper, I analyze the ways in which the US anti-sweatshop movement—particularly United Students Against Sweatshops and the Worker Rights Consortium—has engaged in a process of strategic innovation in response to the globalization of apparel production and the concomitant rise of sweatshops. In particular, I seek to understand the process by which movements modify their existing strategies in the face of new challenges. While scholars of social movements have studied the outcome of this process—strategy—there has been less attention to the process of how movements develop strategy—strategizing. This involves a dialectic between experience, consolidated in the form of strategic models, and ideology, i.e. the values, social theory and norms of the movement. When the movement encountered new obstacles, they engaged in strategic innovation through a process of democratic deliberation where they reflected on their past experiences. During this phase, the anti-sweatshop movement drew on their ideology of worker empowerment to help them decide what goals they wanted to achieve and to make sense of how their social environment was creating obstacles for them. Their ideology served as an interpretive-analytic lens through which they reflected on and learned from their past experiences. In this paper, I focus on two periods of innovation in the anti-sweatshop movement: first the development of the Workers Rights Consortium as an independent monitor of apparel companies and second the development of the Designated Suppliers Program as a new means of disciplining them to respect workers’ rights.
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In its international development agenda, the Bush administration has shown an unexpected concern for the poor, promoting giving grants instead of loans to poor countries and convincing the G8 to forgive their debts. Based on an analysis of Congressional testimony, I argue that these reforms are part of a larger project. The Bush administration has implemented a new system of aid conditionality, designed to increase their regulatory control over developing countries. They also argue that “failed states” and poverty is a major cause of terrorism—and that their reforms, by reducing poverty, are essential to the “war on terror.”
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Notional defined contribution (NDC) accounts represent a new model for social security reform that so far has been adopted in seven countries. While NDC schemes remain public, they call for the individual accounts favored by neoliberal policy analysts. NDC schemes would address many of the demographic and fiscal problems threatening pension systems but, depending on the country, could do so in a way that puts low-paid workers and women at greater risk than do the schemes being replaced. NDC systems are often the result of a compromise between different interest groups, typically between neoliberal economic elites on the right and labor unions or pensioners’ organizations on the left.
Other Publications
These publications are rooted in my scholarly research, but not academic journal publications as such.
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Matthew S. Williams. 2022. “Global Justice as a Social Movement.” In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (2nd ed.). Edited by George Ritzer and Chris Rojek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
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Most public old-age pension schemes around the world are based at least in part on the pay-as-you-go defined benefit (PAYGO DB) model. As these schemes have matured and the limitations of this approach have become more salient, pension experts have begun considering alternative models. The Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) model, which is also financed on a PAYGO basis, has emerged as one of the major new approaches. In the years ahead it may be combined with or possibly displace the funded defined contribution model as the major alternative to the PAYGO DB model. Drawing primarily on evidence from NDC schemes in 6 countries (Sweden, Italy, Poland, Latvia, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Mongolia), the goal of this paper is to describe the NDC model and to review its strengths and limitations relative to the major alternatives. A four pillar pension scheme is proposed to illustrate how a NDC pillar might be integrated into a multi-pillar scheme. One strength (relative to the PAYGO DB model) is that it makes a more explicit link between contributions and eventual pension benefits; however, the flip-side of this strength is that it provides less adequate pension benefits to low-wage workers due to the lack of income redistribution. The fiscal burden of the transition is less than that associated with a shift to a funded defined contribution scheme, but NDC schemes lack many of the potential economic benefits associated with funded defined contribution schemes, such as contributing to economic growth. The NDC model may become common among the nations in the process of making the transition from centrally planned to market economies, among Western European nations, and among developing nations. It is less likely to be adopted in nations that currently have fully or partially privatized schemes in place. In the United States, the model will probably get relatively little attention in the debate over Social Security reform, at least for the foreseeable future. However, it is a model that would put workers with low wages and irregular work histories at less risk than the funded defined contribution alternative being actively considered in current debates about Social Security reform in the United States.