This interview is part of a new series at Daily Kos called Five Questions. That’s how many we’ll be seeking answers for from a wide variety of politically engaged people, both the renowned and some you’ve probably never heard of.
Erik Loomis is a labor and environmental historian at the University of Rhode Island who blogs at Lawyers, Guns & Money. He’s the author of Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe, a must-read on labor and environmental concerns in the era of globalization, as well as of Empire of Timber: Labor and the Pacific Northwest Forests.
LAURA CLAWSON: Out of Sight pulls together a wide swath of history and geography, from the early 20th century to today, from the United States to Bangladesh. How do you connect all this?
ERIK LOOMIS: Out of Sight tells a story of how American workers tamed corporate misbehavior in the twentieth century. I use historical events such as the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 that killed 146 workers and the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 to demonstrate how Americans experienced terrible tragedies and organized to fight so they never happened again. Up to 1980, Americans did a remarkable job over previous decades of reining in the terrible things corporations did to workers and to the environment. Unions became legitimate and companies had to provide decent wages, vacation pay, health care, and retirement packages. Citizens forced companies to stop belching toxins into the air and water. The legendary smoky air of Pittsburgh is not something that Americans under the age of 50 have experienced. Americans hardly created a paradise of economic, social, and racial equality, but we went a long ways to improving our society.
Corporations escaped all of these laws and unions by seeking to move their operations to states and then nations that do not have these labor and environmental protections. This started early in the twentieth century when textile producers escaped labor unions in New England by moving to the South. But after 1965, when Mexico began recruiting American companies to open maquiladoras on the border, corporations fled out of the United States to cut wages and increase profits. That quickly spread beyond Mexico to Central America and Asia and around the world. Today, we have a global race to the bottom as companies look to source their raw materials and industrial operations in nations offering the lowest wages, most dangerous working conditions, and weakest environmental enforcement. If a textile factory unionizes in Guatemala, the company can just close it and reopen it twenty miles away over the Honduran border. This means that working people in nations like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and El Salvador cannot demand the accountability from companies that Americans did during the twentieth century because companies can simply pack up and move to a new location.
So when the Rana Plaza apparel factory collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013, killing over 1100 workers making clothing for companies like Walmart, it was far out of the sight of Americans. Unlike after Triangle, American consumers wouldn’t organize to demand changes or corporate accountability. Most of us can’t even find Bangladesh on the map, not to mention understand how to connect with workers there. Corporations have effectively used capital mobility to separate production from the consumers who buy their products. Instead, clothing just magically appears on hangers in the mall and meat magically comes packaged at the grocery store. Corporations make sure that we can’t know how it was made.
Moreover, this capital mobility has decimated the American working class. Growing income inequality, long-term unemployment, and the other economic problems fueling insurgent political movements in the United States can be traced back to the destruction of jobs for working-class Americans. There simply are not jobs for those laid off when factories in Ohio and Pennsylvania closed. The U.S. has done a terrible job of figuring out what happens to working-class people when their jobs go away. Telling them to get an education or retraining or that an information economy will provide job growth means nothing to people who do not have the ability to go to college or any jobs to retrain for.
In short, unfettered capital mobility is at the center of inequality in the United States and abroad. We need to place this issue at the center of our agenda to fix American economic problems and our agenda to stop the exploitation of the global poor by western companies.
LC: Labor and the environment have often been posed against each other, yet you link them. How has that happened historically and how could it work today?
LOOMIS: Too often, we think of the environment as forests, deserts, and oceans and not of cities, factories, and schools. But these are environments too. During the period of popular environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s, greens recognized this. Laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were widely supported by the American public and politicians because they cleaned up the environment that we all shared. Many of these foundational environmental laws passed almost unanimously. This began to change when corporations moved jobs abroad and scared workers by claiming environmental legislation would force them to close shop and move. At the same time, the environmental movement shifted to focusing on issues like wilderness protection, which has less day-to- day impact on people’s lives. It’s unfortunate that environmentalists and workers often oppose each other because they share the same fundamental opponent: greedy companies who want to profit off of lowering wages or polluting or moving jobs to where they can do these things.
There are constant attempts by groups like the Blue-Green Alliance to bring these two movements together. Opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership has been one area where this has been fruitful. It’s harder on issues like climate change, where unions such as the Laborers are denouncing environmentalists for opposing projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline. They have a point—in a society where there are few good jobs for working people, it’s hard to say no to any project. Environmentalists need to a much better job of making worker rights part of their agenda. We need to produce green energy instead of fossil fuel energy. But to make that appealing to workers, environmentalists need to fight for those projects to be constructed with union workers. Wind turbines should be produced in the United States by unionized steel workers and erected with those Laborers members who now want the Keystone pipeline.
Building these connections are important. Climate change will affect the poor—both in the United States and abroad—disproportionately. Fighting it as a justice issue is absolutely necessary. Both unions and environmentalists need to be on board with the other’s agenda, even though there will also be areas where frictions develop.
LC: You make the case against the boycott impulse of saying "well, I personally just won't shop there." What's wrong with that and how do we get past it to take action that will put real pressure on companies to change?
LOOMIS: The problem with individuals choosing to boycott companies for a given behavior like using sweatshops is that it doesn’t really accomplish anything for the workers involved. Kalpona Akter, a leader of the Bangladeshi apparel workers movement, has explicitly asked westerners not to boycott the factories. These workers need jobs! If we decide to go buy clothing at the thrift store, we might make ourselves feel good and morally righteous for not supporting an exploitative system, but the reality is that we are doing nothing to change corporate behavior. What we have to do is organize to demand the companies making this clothing be held accountable for their actions. That’s what workers want.
There is an exception to my position on the boycott and that’s when the affected workers ask for one. The United Farm Workers most famously used the boycott during the grape strikes of the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, being an ethical consumer means learning about what workers need and want from you and trying to accomplish those aims to help them, not to make yourself feel good.
Real pressure on the companies can come through movements like the United Students Against Sweatshops, who organized on college campuses in the 1990s to force colleges and universities to contract for their school-sanctioned clothing under ethical guidelines. USAS is still around today. Reinvigorating these sorts of movements that use our power in the organizations to which we belong—schools, churches, social clubs—to place pressure on apparel companies or other industries that use child labor or forced labor or sweatshop labor is how we start to make that change. There are already groups like the Harry Potter Alliance doing this sort of work, in this case on Harry Potter-themed products like chocolates that are produced without child labor.
LC: What do you think is a best-case scenario for these issues in the next let's say eight years? And the worst case?
The best case scenario starts with the defeat of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which President Obama and other supporters have called a free trade agreement, but is really a corporate rights agreement between twelve Pacific basin nations. Among many other problems with it, the TPP allows corporations to bring suit against nations for passing laws to limit their profits in so-called Investor State Dispute Settlement courts. These ISDS courts are extrajudicial, allowing citizens no say over their decisions. These courts, which are already being used in other trade agreements, have allowed Philip Morris to sue Uruguay for lost profits after that nation increased the size of health warnings on cigarette packaging. This is unacceptable. Bernie Sanders campaigned hard against the TPP and Hillary Clinton has claimed she does not support either. Defeating it will be tough, but can be done. Even if the TPP is not defeated, there are steps we as Americans can take to solve these problems. President Obama recently signed a bill closing a loophole in the Tariff Act of 1930 that allowed for products made by slave labor to enter the U.S. if there are no other ways to acquire that product. Companies had blown that loophole wide open, allowing all sorts of products from forced labor into the U.S. This is an important precedent. We can control the conditions of production for goods coming into the United States. We already do this. We have laws against products made from endangered species, like ivory, for instance. Closing the slave labor loophole is another example.
Therefore, eight years from now, we could have passed a wide number of laws that set standards of American corporate behavior overseas, gave workers and citizens around the world the right to sue in U.S. courts for the violation of these standards under the provisions of the Alien Tort Claims Act (which has already allowed for the use of American courts to prosecute global human rights violations), and made sure that no matter where American corporations choose to operate and who they contract with in their supply chains, that they be held legally responsible for ensuring basic standards on wages, working conditions, and pollution. Doing so would also undermine some of the advantages of constant capital mobility and hopefully allow more jobs to stay in the United States and allow the people of Bangladesh and Honduras the possibility to create middle classes of their own.
There is no reason that 1100 workers should die making our clothing. We can stop that from happening if we seek to use the U.S. legal code to hold companies accountable. This is hard work but it is not utopian. We already have the tools. We can already see how organizing changes the conversation on labor rights, as the push to increase the minimum wage demonstrates. I recognize that organizing around global labor rights is much harder than the minimum wage because fewer Americans see the direct impact on their lives, but this is serious global justice issue that also impacts us in the United States. Fighting for global labor codes is just and good policy.
The worst case scenario is that more disasters happen that kill workers, nothing happens despite this great suffering, and the ISDS courts essentially veto any possible improvements nations make to their working conditions or environmental laws because they would cut into corporate profits. Meanwhile, inequality remains a major problem both in the United States and around the developing world. In other words, the worst case scenario is pretty much what we see today.
LC: Switching gears, social media and blogs and the like obviously offer opportunities for academics to become what we like to describe as public intellectuals. You fit that bill reasonably well but you're also an academic whose job was targeted by the right-wing media for using a common figure of speech about NRA head Wayne LaPierre. Obviously you've continued to speak bluntly, but how do you assess the possibilities and dangers here?
LOOMIS: Certainly speaking out has its risks, as I know and so many others know, most famously Steven Salaita, who was fired from the University of Illinois for holding controversial positions about Israel and Palestine. The possibilities of working in public forums in the internet are great. Overall, it’s been a wonderful thing for me personally. Not only are there really smart groups of scholars who connect through writing online, but also there are so many possibilities for people to present and disseminate their amazing work in a wide variety of ways. This is not just the historians that are my scholarly community, but for labor writers, for people working on environmental justice, international development, and climate issues, for people in the wealthy western nations to connect with and learn from affected peoples in nations like Bangladesh, etc. And for someone like myself, who is seeking to use my historical knowledge to influence a particular set of policy issues, being active online has been invaluable.
But certainly, there are drawbacks. Anyone on Twitter has seen how utterly vile and nasty people have been to each other in 2016, especially within the left during the Democratic primary. It’s moved from policy disagreements to personal attacks in some really awful ways. That’s hardly news as Twitter has given individuals the power to be terrible to one another under anonymity. The treatment of feminist writers like Lindy West by male trolls is the most classic example of this. Sites like Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy seek to target people on the left for attack. That’s what happened to me in 2012 after the Sandy Hook shooting when I demanded accountability for NRA head Wayne LaPierre. Luckily for me, I was already had a decent online presence with a lot of other academics knowing who I was and luckily I am the member of a strong faculty union, so my job was safe. But Twitter especially, for all its benefits, has potentially severe consequences for those who want to speak up to power.
But I have continued to use social media to advocate for the policy aims I hope to see enacted. If I don’t do it, who will?