Diverse yet unified in spirit, decentralized yet internationalized, the movement is without a name, without a membership roll, without central leadership and without a headquarters, held together only by common ideals and global strands of faxes, E-mail and Web sites, plus occasional international conferences. Globalization and Sweatshops. Women and men making export goods in Mexico, Malaysia and Madagascar become aware of ways to protect their rights and organize real unions where before none existed. Academics and journalists start investigating the causes of worker unrest in faraway lands by talking directly with workers. Shoppers in suburban supermarkets become conscious of how they personally are connected with distant developments.
Businesses worry about such complicity too.
Television footage about a brand-name product made in sweatshops does not help a corporate image. The excuse that sweatshops generally are owned and operated by foreign contractors, not by the home corporation, is no longer tenable, especially since industry leaders such as Nike and Liz Claiborne have accepted responsibility for what their contractors do. Hence the trend, starting in the early 1990's, toward corporate codes of conduct to cover the labor practices of their myriad foreign firms under contract to make garments, shoes, toys and other goods for U.S. consumers. But still too few corporations have adopted codes. And corporations with codes often have inadequate enforcement.