Consumer Campaigns
Consumers have the power to exert considerable influence on businesses. By impacting profits of businesses that harm the environment or use unfair employee practices, campaigns can bring positive change. The best consumer campaign activities is education, ie enabling individuals, corporations, public buyers and investors to make informed choices.
There are other activities in a consumer-oriented campaign, but almost all focus on raising awareness of consumers. The media can be used eg Letters to the Editor, Press Releases, and Public Service announcements. Demonstrations can act to educate a large number of people and at the same time show business the strength of consumer sentiment. Demonstrations can include: vigils, sit-ins, marches, or picket lines.
A vigil is usually a silent gathering of people, usually at night with candles to honour or remember lost lives or victims.
A sit-in occurs when a group of people occupy a space that is either public or private, to demand certain outcomes. Usually they will sit until their demands have been met or satisfactory negotiation has occurred.
A march comprises a group of people who usually hold signs to depict their 'cause' and chant, and walk from one point to another for a message to beconveyed to the public and decision makers.
Picket lines are formed with people holding signs, chanting and marching outside a building, factory or office.
Creative action can also be taken to draw attention to the reasons for boycotting certain businesses or products.
HOW DO SWEATSHOPS FIT IN WITH THE GLOBAL ECONOMY?
The signature characteristic of the new global economy is the increased mobility and flexibility given to finance capital. Corporations now have more freedom than ever before to locate to whatever countries will provide the lowest wages and the loosest regulations, thereby keeping the company's costs in check. The retail industry has taken advantage of this new dynamic like few other business sectors.
If sweatshops have become a metaphor for globalization's excesses, that's because garment factories are, in fact, the shock troops of the global economy. Visit a country that has just recently opened itself up to foreign investment, and you will likely find a host of garment factories, even if there are very few other multinational enterprises located there. Nicaragua and Cambodia are a typical examples—poor, war-torn countries that have attracted scores of garment manufacturers but very little else in the way of foreign investment. Low tech, intensely dependent on cheap labor, clothing manufacturing is the crest of the corporate globalization wave.
Separate forces meet in a shameful mix: A footloose industry scours the world for the cheapest wages; countries eager for any kind of investment auction off their workers to the lowest bidder; government regulators deliberately look the other way when abuses occur in order to keep foreign investors happy. It's that combination of desperate profit-seeking and equally desperate investment pursuit which has created the race to the bottom that is at the root of the sweatshop resurgence.
For workers, the current system is a trap. The apparel manufacturers fear that if they raise their workers' wages, and therefore their prices to the US retailers, the US retailers will simply go someplace with even cheaper workers. The threat is real. Because the garment industry is so mobile, and because the purchasing ability off the retailers is so flexible—they can shift sourcing from one country to another in a matter of a fashion season—any country that raises its wages or enforces its workers' rights risks is, as mainstream economists say, "pricing itself out of the market." That risk is what keeps wages low as long as the retail corporations demand the cheapest price possible.
The race to the bottom is happening. Regardless of which country they live in, garment workers endure the same long hours, the same hard work in demeaning environments, and same small wages.