The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

My T-shirt was born in Texas because of a long tradition of public policy that has protected farmers from a variety of risks, including price risks, labor market risks, credit risks, and weather risks. While American growers have displayed and continue to display remarkable creativity and adaptability in both the technical and business sides of cotton agriculture, these tendencies are bolstered by the economic, educational, and political infrastructure of the United States, which fosters effective public-private partnerships that facilitate the growers’ innovation and progress.

The rules of the game that govern global production of T-shirts are the result of the efforts of generations of activists, who continue to push back against the markets and rewrite both labor law and accepted corporate practice. My T-shirt was made in China under the state-engineered hukou system that still constrains labor mobility and limits the flexibility of labor markets. And while globalization activists’ favorite targets are large U.S.-based multinational firms, most of the companies in my T-shirt’s life story were relatively small family firms (Sherry Manufacturing, Shanghai Brightness, Trans-Americas, the Reinsch farm) rather than large multinationals, and the two biggest companies in my T-shirt’s life story (Shanghai Knitwear and the Shanghai Number 36 Cotton Mill) were owned by the Chinese government.

My T-shirt’s journey from China to the United States is engineered today by a web of highly political constraints on markets, in which both rich- and poor-country producers seek political protection from markets, and especially from the China threat. The China threat in turn, because of the political protections for industry (state ownership, the hukou system, subsidies, and a managed currency), is really a political threat rather than a market threat.

I now see that even the frenetic and market-driven used clothing trade is in part a political creation. While his own government gives Ed Stubin no protection at all from market forces, trade barriers in China have the unintended consequence of at least some protection for Trans-Americas.

In revising this book, I have kept in mind Hans Peter Lankes’ evocative image of “circling the Buddhist stone garden.” To circle, of course, suggests seeing from a variety of perspectives, and to circle again and again means to see new things each time. As I have circled, my conclusion regarding the importance of politics in understanding my T-shirt’s life has only strengthened. It is political reactions to markets, political protection from markets, and political involvement in markets, rather than competition in markets, that are at the center of my T-shirt’s life story. To either glorify or vilify the markets is to dangerously oversimplify the world of trade. To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the politics, stupid.”

We might view all of these protective political maneuvers as an “artificial” interference with the market mechanism. Indeed, it has become fashionable to equate the market mechanism with biological processes such as survival of the fittest, in which nature is best left alone. But while interference may be less than optimal as economic policy, it is surely not unnatural; in fact the reverse is true. What could be more natural than seeking protection from a world of Darwinian survival?

My T-shirt’s story, then, is not a tale of Adam Smith’s market forces, but is instead a tale of Karl Polanyi’s double movement, in which market forces on the one hand meet demands for protection on the other. This call for protection is not just from textile workers or cotton farmers, but from citizens everywhere who feel a growing unease about globalization even as incomes rise. In some cases, the political protections make things worse for the poor (U.S. cotton subsidies), while in other cases, they make things better (minimum labor standards). In all cases, however, they are central to the story.

Neither trade nor theorizing about trade began with Adam Smith. There was trade in textiles and clothing, and debates surrounding this trade, long before there were economists. For centuries, trade was a subject of moral and religious debate, rather than a subject for economic analysis. Indeed, in perusing the early Christians’ debates over trade, I am struck by the complete absence of economic discussion.² While economists often despair that noneconomic factors influence debates over trade policy, with a long historical view we see that it has been only relatively recently that economic factors entered into trade discussions, let alone became central. That moral discourse continues to pervade debates about trade should not be surprising.

My T-shirt reveals that the moral and political discussions are critical today if the double movement is to have widespread blessings. Some players in my T-shirt’s life story—Nelson Reinsch, North Carolina textile workers—have some protections. A few—Ed Stubin and Geofrey Milonge—are either winning or at least afloat by competing in the markets, or benefiting from the indirect protection given to others. Neither side of the double movement, however, has reached millions. Most African cotton farmers, for instance, are granted neither political protections nor market opportunities nor access to technical or even basic literacy. In China, while most sweatshop workers are happy to have escaped the farm, these young women are second-class citizens in a country where even first-class citizens lack political voice. It is not the cruelty of market forces that has doomed millions of African farmers and Asian sweatshop workers. It is instead exclusion from opportunities found in market competition, political participation, or both.

This exclusion occurs both at the hands of developing country governments who either retain the spoils from the markets (African governments) or fail in various ways to give their citizens voice (Chinese government), and at the hands of rich-country governments that continue to maintain a shameful double standard in trade policy (U.S. government). Fortunately, positive change is afoot. Cutting agricultural subsidies, democratization, and giving poor countries a place at the table at trade negotiations are all steps in the right direction.

Since completing my travels, I have come to believe in a moral case for trade that is even more compelling than the economic case. After observing two world wars, former Secretary of State Cordell Hull wrote in his memoirs that he had come to believe that trade was an instrument of peace:

I saw that you could not separate the idea of commerce from the idea of war and peace. You could not have serious war anywhere in the world and expect commerce to go on as before... . And [I saw that] wars were often caused by economic rivalry... I thereupon came to believe that ... if we could increase commercial exchanges among nations over lowered trade and tariff barriers and remove international obstacles to trade, we would go a long way toward eliminating war itself.³

As I followed my T-shirt around the globe, each person introduced me to the next and then the next until I had a chain of friends that stretched all the way around the world: Nelson and Ruth Reinsch, Gary Sandler, Patrick and Jennifer Xu, Mohammed and Gulam Dewji, Geofrey Milonge, Auggie Tantillo, Ed Stubin, Su Qin and Tao Yong Fang. How can I type this list of names without agreeing with Cordell Hull? The Texans, Chinese, Jews, Sicilians, Tanzanians, Muslims, Christians, whites, blacks, and browns who passed my T-shirt around the global economy get along just fine. Actually, much better than fine, thank you very much. All of these people, and millions more like them, are bound together by trade in cotton, yarn, fabric, and T-shirts. I believe that each of them, as they touch the next one, are doing their part to keep the peace.

Some early Christians believed that God did not want us to trade. St. Augustine was unambiguous in his disdain: “For they are active traders ... they attain not the grace of God.”⁴ Indeed, the very existence of oceans was taken as evidence that trade was contrary to God’s will. St. Ambrose advised that we could go fishing, or enjoy the view, but never should we use the sea for trade:

Others, however, had a different view of God’s will. Perhaps, instead, trade was a part of God’s plan to help us get along with those different from ourselves. Libanius, writing nearly 2,000 years ago, believed that:

God did not bestow all products upon all parts of the earth, but distributed His gifts over different regions, to the end that men might cultivate a social relationship because one would have need of the help of another, and so He called commerce into being, that all men might be able to have common enjoyment of the fruits of the earth, no matter where produced.⁶

As I watch the many far-flung members of my T-shirt’s extended family continue to “cultivate a social relationship” with one another, I can only agree with Libanius. While some observers of the 2000-2008 period of world history will see primarily war and intolerance, my T-shirt continues to forge bridges of understanding: the bonds formed by my T-shirt can only be a force for good.

So, what do I say to the young woman on the steps at Georgetown University who was so concerned about the evils of the race to the bottom, so concerned about where and how her T-shirt was produced? I would tell her to appreciate what markets and trade have accomplished for all of the sisters in time who have been liberated by life in a sweatshop, and that she should be careful about dooming anyone to life on the farm. I would tell her that the poor suffer more from exclusion from politics than from the perils of the market, and that if she has activist energy left over it should be focused on including people in politics rather than shielding them from markets. And I would tell her about the shoulders she stands on, about her own sisters and brothers in time and the noble family tree of activists, and the difference they have made in a day’s life at work all over the world. I would tell her that, in just a few short years, I have seen the difference her own generation has made, and that someday people will stand on her shoulders, too. I would tell her that Nike, Adidas, and GAP need her to keep watching, and so do Wal-Mart and the Chinese government. I would tell her that I have met dozens of seamstresses in Chinese factories who need her, and that future generations of sweatshop workers and cotton farmers need her as well. I would tell her to look both ways, but to march on.

Yet, as we have seen, the hardest work of this generation of activists is finished now. Not all of the work is finished, but the hard work of shifting the very paradigm by which the global apparel industry operates is finished. The work that remains is important, but it is work at ground level—factory-by-factory work related to how, not whether, large multinationals should be responsible for conditions in their far-flung supply chains. The current generation of campus activists continue to make progress on these issues. This progress reminds us that globalization is not a faceless monster over which we have no control. Human beings write the rules of the game, and the rules are changing every day.

But there is a new generation of protestors on Georgetown’s campus today, and on campuses everywhere. One of Georgetown’s most active student groups is now Eco-Action. Almost all of the apparel company executives I spoke with during the past several years believed that environmental issues will be—indeed are—the newest challenge facing their global industry. While the topics change with the generations, the pushback against global capitalism takes a remarkably similar form. It is the “double movement” all over again—market forces on the one hand versus demand for protection on the other. Whether the protection is for air, or water, or worker safety, or child labor, the unwitting co-conspiracy is alive and well as global capitalism adapts to the demands of the activists and then the broader citizenry. Environmental responsibility, as a corporate creed, has gone mainstream in a remarkably short time.

Whether the issue is labor conditions or clean air, as I continue to circle it becomes harder and harder to be a pessimist. It is not that I wish to gloss over the problems, but rather that I find them to be so much less interesting than the solutions. As I continued to circle the stone garden during the past few years, I saw a multitude of environmental challenges in my T-shirt’s life. But each time I circled I saw a new solution as well—wind-powered spinning mills and soy-based dyes and organic cotton and GM cottonseed and yarn from corn and windmills in the Texas cotton fields. The solutions seem to be coming at dizzying speed, each one more innovative and remarkable than the last. The scientists and entrepreneurs behind these innovations were invariably optimists, and globalization increasingly links them together. While economic activity clearly creates environmental challenges, globalization and continued prosperity also make possible the innovations that hold promise for the ecological future of our planet.

In late 2008 I met Michael Shellenberger at a meeting held at a Washington think tank, and several months later we spoke again by phone. Michael had begun his career in the 1990s as an anti-globalization activist, and had spent several years targeting Nike’s alleged sweatshop practices in Asia.

When we spoke in 2008 Michael had changed his mind about many things, and he felt both older and wiser. He had recognized himself in the opening pages of the first edition of this book, and had identified with the protestor on the steps at Georgetown. “I thought that trade and globalization were evil,” Michael told me. “I thought the companies were evil and the IMF was evil and that the World Bank was evil. I thought that the poor got the raw end of the deal from globalization.”

“I had this nostalgic view of rural peasants,” Michael continued. “I didn’t realize that they did not actually want to be on the farm. They wanted to be in the cities like the rest of us. And I didn’t see how globalization was a way out of their grinding poverty.”

“I’m pro-globalization, now,” Michael told me. “I see that it is a force for good, and I want to improve it rather than stop it. But it is still important to advocate for change. You can be pro-globalization and still want companies to improve.”

Michael concedes what he thinks of as his youthful confusion but he has no regrets about his anti-sweatshop activism. He continues to see the long- lasting impacts that he and his fellow activists had. “I’m very proud of the work we did,” he told me.

In the early 2000s, Michael shifted his focus to from labor to environmental issues. In 2004, he and Ted Norhaus published an essay titled “The Death of Environmentalism” that took the world by storm. The ideas were also published in their 2007 book, titled Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. In short, Michael and Ted argued that the environment was too important to be left to the environmentalists. The environmentalists’ dominant paradigm held that economic growth was a cause of environmental problems, and that solutions were to be found in the “politics of limits” - in words such as “stop,” “restrict,” or “regulate.”⁷

Michael believes that the “politics of limits” has it backwards. Though he is a Democrat and identifies himself as “progressive,” Michael since his anti-sweatshop days has developed a fundamental respect for the ability of economic growth and investment to solve problems, particularly ecological ones. Prosperity brings out the best in human nature, Michael believes, and economic growth can be the solution to our environmental challenges. Michael and Ted “…called on environmentalists to replace their doomsday discourse with an imaginative, aspirational, and future- oriented one.”⁸ Investment and innovation in clean energy and technologies are enabled by economic growth, and will create the prosperity of the future, just as past infrastructure investments in highways, railroads, microchips, and the Internet created the prosperity of the present. In late 2008 Barack Obama named Steven Chu, the Nobel prize winning physicist, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Chu is a forceful advocate for investment and innovation to solve environmental challenges. Indeed, Obama has proposed “green” jobs and investment as partial solutions to America’s economic and environmental problems, and many of Michael’s and Ted’s ideas are now reflected in Obama’s environmental and economic policies. In 2008 the two young activists were named “Heroes of the Environment” by Time magazine.

If Michael and I had met 10 years ago, we would have disagreed about almost everything; an anti-globalization activist on one side of the table, a business school professor on the other. We have both changed our minds a lot since then, and I’d guess that now we likely have no important disagreements at all.

We are both optimists, for one thing. I still have my red parrot T-shirt, but it is looking more and more like an antique, a relic of a different era, an era with pesticides and phthalates and without codes of conduct and factory monitors. To watch the dizzying innovations of the last few years, I can only believe that tomorrow’s T-shirt will have a better story still. The future isn’t perfect, but it is brighter than it used to be.