Their emerging social movement has dimensions, actual and potential, that even the participants hardly fathom. Diversified and 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, email, and Websites, plus occasional international conferences. Women and men making export goods in Mexico, Malaysia, and Madagascar become aware of ways to protect their rights and organize real unions where none existed. Academics and journalists start investigating the causes of worker unrest in far- away 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.
TV footage about a brand-name product made in sweatshops doesn't help the 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 1990s, 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. Instead of fixing the problem, the codes became guides that worker activists abroad use to measure the gap between promises and performance. So, after a barrage of embarrassing publicity in 1996 about sweatshops even in the United States, the Secretary of Labor at the time, Robert Reich saw an opening for an industry-wide initiative.