INTRODUCTION

Just as sweatshops have become the symbol of the perverse effects of neoliberal globalization, the transnational anti-sweatshop movement lies at the heart of the struggle for social justice in the global economy. In the global North, the reemergence of sweatshops in such cities as New York and Los Angeles entails the return of the economic and legal realities of the nineteenth century (Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000; Ross 1997). In the South, the exploitative labor conditions and the unfulfilled promise of employment and growth have turned maquilas into an icon of the failure of late twentieth-century neoliberalism. In bridging the North–South divide through highly plural, dynamic, and decentralized transnational advocacy networks (TANs), the anti-sweatshop movement holds out the prospect of a revamped, twenty-first century labor internationalism (Evans, forthcoming; Moody 1997).

Beyond its political and symbolic importance, the anti-sweatshop movement offers a privileged vantage point to examine the role of law in counter-hegemonic globalization for two reasons. First, in terms of social movement theory (Snow et al. 1986), the “framing” of the anti-sweatshop cause has crucially relied on law and legal discourse. Given that abuses committed in global sweatshops – from physical violence to sexual harassment and misery wages – undermine fundamental conditions of human dignity, TANs have framed their struggle as a vindication of basic human rights. This has not only lent a potent moral force to the movement but has also placed the mobilization of human rights rules and discourses at the center of TANs' strategies.