This blanket defense of national sovereignty includes that of the United States. Thus USAS encourages a nationalist outlook, as opposed to a class conscious understanding of the basic conflict between the interests of workers and capitalist owners within any nation, and the fundamental identity of interests of workers of all nations. It does not analyze the prominent role that both the Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO have played in fostering the very conditions that the students in USAS aim to ameliorate. Inc. The lawsuit was a reaction to a common practice whereby corporations compensate unions if union workers lose their jobs when companies move overseas. The conception that a document signed by a university can legislate the end of exploitation and sweatshops is extremely naive.
Exploitation of workers is the basis upon which profits are made.
It is an inherent and necessary feature of capitalism itself, and cannot be eliminated by signing a code of conduct. Sweatshop conditions are not, fundamentally, the result of the subjective motives of evil corporate leaders, but arise from the necessity of capital to extract ever greater amounts of surplus value, and hence profit, from the labor of the working class. This is, of course, not to absolve the corporations of responsibility for sweatshops. Nevertheless, the subjective actions of the corporations, as well as the political establishment in the United States, in fostering the increased exploitation of the working class have an objective foundation. In this sense, USAS attempts to revive the student power protest politics of the 1960s.