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A longtime activist, sociologist Bob Ross reveals the persistence of sweatshops in the global economy, and encourages his students to confront issues concerning fair labor practices. |
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Meet the Researchers:
Helping a greater cause
Interview with Professor Robert Ross and Mikaela
Luttrell-Rowland
Update: Since this interview took place, the book by Professor Ross mentioned below has been published as Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshop. Professor Ross recently appeared on National Public Radio's The Connection in a show titled Made in China.
Professor Robert Ross has been conducting research on what has come
to be known as the sweatshop industry. A sweatshop is defined as a "workplace in which workers are employed
for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy or oppressive conditions." Ross’s
specific area of interest is the abuse of labor rights in the apparel industry
and he teaches a seminar entitled “Sweatshops in America in Global Context."
For Ross's course "Class, Status, and Power" students researched the
backgrounds of board of director members in order
to learn more about the companies that make college insignia t-shirts. One participant was Mikaela
Luttrell-Rowland who presented her research at Fall Fest '00 in a presentation
titled "Jansport Carrying Power: The Position of Directors of the Vanity
Fair Corporation in the Power Structure of U.S. Capital." In a recent interview,
Ross and Mikaela
discussed:
- Student research into makers of college insignia clothing and backpacks
- Using the Internet for serious research
- The social movement United Students Against Sweatshops
How will the research from the 'Sweatshops' seminar be used in the future?
Ross: Next year when I am on sabbatical leave I will write a
book on sweatshop issues.The book is under contract with University of Michigan press, and it is
going to be called--it may change when we get closer--it’s a phrase from a
song, it's called 'Hearts Starve'.It comes from a famous labor song “Bread and Roses.” The operative line is
“Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; hearts starve as
well as bodies; give us bread and give us roses.”
One part of the book will focus on the social movements that have arisen in the last
few years, including campus based social movements, to ensure that college
insignia clothing is made under fair labor conditions.Now, part of the analysis of a social movement includes its institutional
environment, and I want to include in that discussion the structures of the
corporations that produce this clothing.We now have studies of almost all of the major producers of
t-shirts and sweatshirts.I will therefore be able to discuss with some factual
density, because of the student work, the leadership of these organizations, their marketing strategies, etc.One of the things we discovered is that the campus fraction of their
overall revenues is relatively small.
Mikaela: I feel it was really exciting to know
that the research you were doing for class wasn’t just going to end there, it
was going to go beyond the class.It
was a very exciting and incredibly rewarding experience to think that at the end
of the semester you were going to help a greater cause.
What did you find out from the research? What corporations did you look at, and what were your results?
Mikaela: I was interested in Jansport, which makes backpacks.
My specific question had to do with who the individual members are, what
their individual backgrounds are, etc.
I was also looking at the way power is a part of that.
How did you find out about people?
Mikaela:Lexis/Nexis,
newspaper clippings…that was the really exciting part, because I never really
knew all of the resources that were available to find out the things for this
class. There are a number of ways that you can find out about individuals.
Ross: It was another agenda of mine for the
class…to make use of the World Wide Web and the government and other documents
that are there for very serious purposes rather than looking up the weather or
whatever.In the last few years,
there has been a virtual revolution in the kind of information that has appeared
on the web.For example, Mikaela
and her classmates were able to find very detailed information about corporate
and executive compensation from Securities and Exchange Commission documents and
by doing very wide searches through the Business Press, which is available to us
here at Clark University through a database called Lexis/Nexis.We discovered in the case of Jansport, which makes backpacks and
t-shirts, and Champion, both of which are owned by very, very large corporations
(Jansport by Vanity Fair and Champion by Sara Lee) that these are
not marginal corporations.These
are big firms that are actually very well connected to very powerful forces in
the economy. All of this is made possible mainly through web-based work, although
there are still some wonderful reference sources in the library that our
reference staff was very helpful in tracking down for us.
So when you find out that these are big players in the economy, what do you do with that information?
Ross:Well,
there is a research and a citizen dimension to this that will appear in my final
academic work published eventually in the context of analyzing both the issue
and the social movement that has become apparent in the last few years.As a citizen, I play a role as advisor to the local campus
anti-sweatshop activists.It
has to do with the leverage you do or don’t have over these corporations. If
the Sara Lee Corporation decided that to clean up Champion’s act was too
expensive, they could sell the whole division and lose less than one percent of
their profits.
What other types of research are students doing in your classes?
Ross: This semester I am teaching a seminar on
Comparative Perspectives on Poverty and Social Policy.
My long-range project is keeping track of the ups and downs in the
proportion of our population that is considered poor and how, over the long
range, changes have affected that.So,
one of our sub-projects for the seminar this year will be to ask the question
how has the last five or ten years of fairly low unemployment rates effected who
is poor and who is not.We are each
going to take some relatively manageable, factual part of that question. At the end of the semester,
we'll have a mini-conference with the nine
of us and see if we can together answer that question.
Mikaela, what was it like to work so closely with Professor Ross?
Mikaela:A huge plus about coming to Clark is the amount of one-on-one mentoring.
There's a big difference between learning definitions in a class-- for
example the definition of 'upper class'-- and actually investigating how it applies and what
it actually means.
Ross:Just
as with the students, I think one is most motivated when you have the sense that
the work you are doing has a broader importance and a broader constituency.That is on one hand, and on the other hand, when students love what they
are doing professors are happy.There
is nothing that equals the gratification of working with motivated students.The meta-agenda, which I told the students about in class at
the time, is to teach them skills that they will have for the rest of their
lives.The fact of the matter is,
with a high-speed modem and a reasonable library, you can find a lot of
information about corporations.
It took our students awhile because they were learning the skills, but that is
what I wanted to convey.
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Additional Resources
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