PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
How Student Protests Sent a Business Professor around the World
On a cold day in February 1999 I watched a crowd of about 100 students gather on the steps of Healy Hall, the Gothic centerpiece of the Georgetown University campus. The students were raucous and passionate, and campus police milled about on the edge of the crowd, just in case. As speaker after speaker took the microphone, the crowd cheered almost every sentence. The crowd had a moral certitude, a unity of purpose, and while looking at a maze of astonishing complexity, saw with perfect clarity only the black and white, the good and evil. Corporations, globalization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) were the bad guys, ruthlessly crushing the dignity and livelihood of workers around the world. A short time later, more than 50,000 like-minded activists had joined the students at the annual meeting of the WTO in Seattle, and by the 2002 IMF-World Bank meeting, the crowd had swelled to 100,000. Anti-globalization activists stymied meetings of the bad guys in Quebec, Canada, and Genoa, Italy, as well. At the 2003 WTO meeting in Cancun, the activists were joined by representatives from a newly energized group of developing countries, and world trade talks broke down across a bitter rich-poor divide. Anti-globalization activists came from college campuses and labor unions, religious organizations and shuttered textile mills, human rights groups and African cotton farms. Lumped together, the activists were named the globalization “backlash.”
At first, the backlash took the establishment by surprise. Even the left-leaning Washington Post, surveying the carnage in Seattle, seemed bewildered. “What Was That About?” they asked on the editorial page the next day. From the offices on the high floors of the IMF building, the crowd below was a ragtag bunch of well-intentioned but ill-informed obstructionists, squarely blocking the only path to prosperity. According to conventional economic wisdom, globalization and free trade offered salvation rather than destruction to the world’s poor and oppressed. How could the backlash be so confused?
The backlash seemed to quiet by about 2005. “Phew,” the business establishment seemed to say, “Glad that’s over with.” But a closer look reveals that nothing was really over with, and that, in fact, the reverse had happened. While some of the craziest slogans (“Capitalism is Death”) had faded away, the backlash was not gone, but had gone mainstream. Surveys showed that Americans were markedly less supportive of trade and globalization in 2008 than they had been at the beginning of the decade: while 78 percent of Americans surveyed had a positive view of international trade in 2002, by 2008, only 53 percent were broadly supportive. Americans were also less supportive of trade than citizens of virtually every other industrialized country.
1In Washington, Congress responded to this popular discontent by stymieing further trade liberalization, and the 2008 presidential candidates responded with sound bites strangely similar to those of the 1999 protestors. By 2008, the WTO talks that had been stalled by protestors in Seattle and Cancun were still stalled—after nearly eight years of mostly fruitless negotiations. While the negotiations had been difficult in the best of times, the severe economic downturn that began in late 2008 left little hope for the revival of the trade tasks.
Back at Georgetown in 1999, I watched a young woman seize the microphone. “Who made your T-shirt?” she asked the crowd. “Was it a child in Vietnam, chained to a sewing machine without food or water? Or a young girl from India earning 18 cents per hour and allowed to visit the bathroom only twice per day? Did you know that she lives 12 to a room? That she shares her bed and has only gruel to eat? That she is forced to work 90 hours each week, without overtime pay? Did you know that she has no right to speak out, no right to unionize? That she lives not only in poverty, but also in filth and sickness, all in the name of Nike’s profits?”
I did not know all this. And I wondered about the young woman at the microphone: How did she know?
During the next several years, I traveled the world to investigate. I not only found out who made my T-shirt, but I also followed its life over thousands of miles and across three continents. The result of this investigation was the first edition of Travels of a T-Shirt, published in 2005. The book was—and is—a story about globalization and about the people, politics, and markets that created my cotton T-shirt.
It is fair to ask what the biography of a simple product can contribute to current debates over global trade. In general, stories are out of style today in business and economics research. Little of consequence can be learned from stories, the argument goes, because they offer us only “anecdotal” data. According to today’s accepted methodological wisdom, what really happened at a place and time—the story, the anecdote—might be entertaining but it is intellectually empty: Stories do not allow us to formulate a theory, to test a theory, or to generalize. As a result, researchers today have more data, faster computers, and better statistical methods, but fewer and fewer personal observations.
The story, of course, has a more esteemed role in other disciplines. Richard Rhodes, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, peels back, layer by layer, the invention of the atomic bomb. In the process, he illuminates the intellectual progress of a community of geniuses at work. Laurel Ulrich, in A Midwife’s Tale, uses the diary of a seemingly unremarkable woman to construct a story of a life in the woods of Maine 200 years ago, revealing the economy, social structure, and physical life of a place in a manner not otherwise possible. And in Enterprising Elites, historian Robert Dalzell gives us the stories of America’s first industrialists and the world they built in nineteenth-century New England, thereby revealing the process of industrialization. So, the story, whether of a person or a thing, can not only reveal a life but illuminate the bigger world that formed the life. This is my objective for the story of my T-shirt.
“Does the world really need another book about globalization?” Jagdish Bhagwati asked in the introduction to his 2004 book on the topic. Well, certainly the world does not need another tome either defending or criticizing globalization and trade as abstract concepts, as the cases on both sides have been made eloquently and well.
2 I wrote
Travels of a T-Shirt not to defend a position but to tell a story. And though economic and political lessons emerge from my T-shirt’s story, the lessons are not the starting point. In other words, I tell the T-shirt’s story not to convey morals but to discover them, and simply to see where the story leads.
I brought to the first edition of Travels of a T-Shirt my own biases, and I surely harbor them still. Because I have spent my career teaching in a business school, and no doubt because of my academic background in finance and economics, I know that I share with my colleagues the somewhat off-putting tendency to believe that if everyone understood what we understood—if they “got it”—they wouldn’t argue so much. More than 200 years after Adam Smith advanced his case for free trade in The Wealth of Nations, we are still trying to make sure that our students, fellow citizens, and colleagues in the English department “get it,” because we are sure that once they understand, everyone will agree with us. When I happened by the protests at Georgetown and listened to the T-shirt diatribe, my first thought was that the young woman, however well-intentioned and impassioned, just didn’t “get it.” She needed a book—maybe Travels of a T-Shirt—to explain things. But after following my T-shirt around the world, and after nearly a decade spent talking to farmers, workers, labor activists, politicians, and businesspeople, my biases aren’t quite so biased anymore.
Trade and globalization debates have long been polarized on the virtues versus evils of competitive markets. Economists in general argue that international market competition creates a tide of wealth that (at least eventually) will lift all boats, while critics worry about the effects of unrelenting market forces, especially on workers and the environment. Free trade in apparel, in particular, critics worry, leads only to a downward spiral of wages, working conditions, and environmental degradation that ends somewhere in the depths of a Charles Dickens novel.
My T-shirt’s life suggests, however, that the importance of markets might be overstated by both globalizers and critics. While my T-shirt’s life story is certainly influenced by competitive economic markets, the key events in the T-shirt’s life are less about competitive markets than they are about politics, history, and creative maneuvers to avoid markets. Even those who laud the effects of highly competitive markets are loathe to experience them personally, so the winners at various stages of my T-shirt’s life are adept not so much at competing in markets but at avoiding them. The effects of these avoidance maneuvers can be more damaging for the poor and powerless than market competition itself. In short, my T-shirt’s story turned out to be less about markets than I would have predicted, and more about the historical and political webs of intrigue in which the markets are embedded. In peeling the onion of my T-shirt’s life—especially as it relates to current debates—I kept being led back to history and politics.
Many once-poor countries (e.g., Taiwan or Japan) have become rich due to globalization, and many still-poor countries (e.g., China or India) are nowhere near as poor as they once were. The poorest countries in the world, however, largely in Africa, have yet to benefit from globalization in any sustained way, and even in rapidly growing countries such as China, many are left behind. My T-shirt’s life is a story of the wealth-enhancing possibilities of globalization in some settings but a “can’t win” trap in others, a trap where power imbalances and poorly functioning politics and markets seem to doom the economic future.
My T-shirt’s story also reveals that the opposing sides of the globalization debate are co-conspirators, however unwitting, in improving the human condition. Economist Karl Polanyi observed, in an earlier version of today’s debate, his famed “double movement,” in which market forces on the one hand were met by demands for social protection on the other.
3 Polanyi was pessimistic about the prospects for reconciling the opposite sides. Later writers—perhaps most artfully Peter Dougherty—have argued instead that “Economics is part of a larger civilizing project,” in which markets depend for their very survival on various forms of the backlash.
4 My T-shirt’s story comes down on Dougherty’s side: Neither the market nor the backlash alone presents much hope for the world’s poor who farm cotton or stitch T-shirts together, but in the unintentional conspiracy between the two sides there is promise. The trade skeptics need the corporations, the corporations need the skeptics, but most of all, the Asian sweatshop worker and African cotton farmer need them both.
The second edition of Travels of a T-Shirt is very much the product of reader reactions to the first. During the past several years I have had the opportunity to speak with fellow academics, students, businesspeople, and policymakers around the United States and the world about the myriad issues raised by the biography of this simple product.
My basic conviction that the biographical approach can illuminate complex economic and political issues in a unique way has only been strengthened by these many conversations, and the second edition of Travels of a T-Shirt remains loyal to this conviction. While the biographical facts of my T-shirt’s life are unchanged, as is the approach I have taken, my many conversations with readers have also illuminated a number of ways in which the story of my T-shirt can evolve to continue to engage a variety of debates.
First, much has happened in the world of international trade since the book’s publication in 2005. While the major lessons of my T-shirt’s life are unchanged, or perhaps even strengthened, much has evolved in the manner in which the relevant industries operate, in the competitive dynamics, and in political developments related to trade and globalization. I hope in this edition to provide an update of this changing landscape and to answer the many questions I have received from readers regarding what has happened in the world of my T-shirt since 2004.
Second, during the 2005 to 2008 period I have also made return trips—often multiple trips—to most of the locations in my T-shirt’s life story, and I have continued to learn from these visits as well as from my continuing correspondence with the many people involved in each stage of the T-shirt’s life. I hope in this edition that the reader can learn as well from these visits and continuing correspondence. I have also benefited tremendously from the hundreds of e-mails and many conversations that have helped me to sharpen the arguments, review new research and evidence, and expand on several topics that have been of special interest to readers.
The third change was born in 2006-2007. I was visiting many colleges and universities during that period, and at Wellesley College and University of Iowa, at Colby College, and at UC Santa Barbara and at Texas Tech—in other words, at universities across the geographical and political landscape—readers were interested in the environmental implications of my T-shirt’s life story. During the same period, the book was also being released in translation, so I found myself in Tokyo, Vienna, and Milan as well. Again, around the world readers wanted to talk about environmental sustainability. Indeed, by 2008, it seemed inconceivable that a book about globalization would fail to address the related environmental issues.
Of course, an entirely new book could be written to tell the environmental story of my T-shirt’s life. I make no claims that I have written such a book. I have, however, illuminated a number of the debates that relate environmental issues to both my T-shirt and to broader issues of trade and globalization.
Though I did not write
Travels of a T-shirt for the “college market,” I have heard from many university faculty who have used this book for a variety of purposes and courses, and I especially hope that the updates provided in this edition will be useful in these settings. To that end, some teaching resources are now available at
www.wiley.com/college/rivoli.
Needless to say, I enjoyed some reviewers’ and commentators’ views of the first edition of this book more than I did others. Sometimes, however, I have heard a reviewer or commentator explain a point in the book, or an argument, better than I did. More than once, I have thought, “I wish I had written that,” when I heard a particularly insightful or evocative comment about what I actually did write. In late 2005 I spoke about Travels of a T-Shirt at the IMF in Washington. There, Hans Peter Lankes, one of the commentators, explained his reaction to the book in language that not only has stuck with me, but which has helped me in this revision. Hans Peter said that reading the book was “… sort of like circling a Buddhist stone garden. One slips into every conceivable perspective on this issue and there are no villains, only actors in what I call an epic struggle and a fantastically complex, forward-driving, and culture-transforming enterprise.”
As I write this in early 2009, I still have not met any villains. Every aspect of my T-shirt’s life is even more fantastically complex than it was earlier in the decade, while the struggles seem even more epic and the actors seem to be running in an even faster race. Yet in this revision I have kept in mind the image of the Buddhist stone garden. My objective, quite simply, has been to continue to circle.
If I learned anything from my travels over most of the past decade, it is that university students represent one of the most powerful forces for change in our society. After I first encountered the protests at Georgetown University in 1999, students peacefully occupied the university president’s office and refused to budge until the university and its apparel suppliers agreed to address the alleged “sweatshop” conditions under which Georgetown T-shirts and other licensed apparel were produced. Similar protests went on at dozens of universities across the country. By 2008, the students and their compatriots around the globe had dramatically changed the way the global apparel industry operates, and had completely rewritten the rules for how some of the world’s largest companies do business. The life story of a T-shirt made today is a different and better story for both workers and for the environment than the story of a T-shirt made just a few years ago. I thought, when I started to follow my T-shirt, that I would in the end have a story that would help the students to see things my way, to understand the virtues of markets in improving the human condition. I do have such a story, I hope, but it is not the whole story. To the students, I also say, I (now) see where you’re coming from. Though I think they see where I’m coming from, too.
Students at Georgetown and elsewhere continue to push corporations and universities to improve labor practices in the global marketplace, but they are now joined by those concerned with the environmental impacts as well. Already, I see these new footprints in business practices and political debates.
My old friends are still here: Nelson, Ruth, Gary, Patrick, Yuan Zhi, Auggie, Julia, and Gulam, everyone who played a part in my T-shirt’s life during my first trip around the world. But new friends are here too: Eric is printing T-shirts with soy-based inks, Yiqi is spinning yarn from corn, and Kelly is marketing organic cotton. In 2008 my simple T-shirt is more complicated and fascinating than ever, a tiny microcosm of creation and destruction in our modern world.