Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

United Students Against Sweatshops heads a wave of anti-sweatshop organizing that has reached over two hundred American college campuses in the past four years. From the northeast to the southwest, at public and private, large and small universities, their campaigns have wreaked havoc on the corporate campus and ruffled multinational companies whose profits depend on young consumers; they have also led to a more broadly based engagement with issues of social justice and provide a potential model for transnational student/worker solidarity.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

New York City journalist Featherstone and the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) have collaborated to write a brief history of university student anti-sweatshop activism and the role of USAS. The organization began in spring 1998 as a coalition of student groups "fighting for sweatshop-free working conditions and workers' rights." USAS now has over 200 chapters on university campuses throughout the world working to ensure that clothing bearing university logos is produced by companies offering a living wage and fair working conditions in their factories. This book includes a time line, a listing of university chapters, and notes on contributors. Each chapter contains vignettes by student USAS members and some factory workers offering a personal look into working conditions and the group's campaigns. Because it is written strictly from the USAS viewpoint, this book is limited in its ability to offer a larger treatment of the world problem of garment factory sweatshops conditions and workers' rights. Academic libraries having a USAS chapter could consider purchasing, while other libraries may want to wait for a more rounded approach to this topic. Joyce M. Cox, Nevada State Lib. & Archives, Reno (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

On college campuses across the country over the last four years, a rising tide of student activism has been targeting Nike, Gap, and other global corporations, demanding that clothing be produced under healthy, safe, and fair working conditions. This small book combines a general overview about the United Students against Sweatshops (USAS)--who they are, how they organize, their issues, political strategies, allies, etc.--with profiles of particular leaders, activists, and sweatshop workers. The style is somewhat scattered, combining articles, newspaper reports, and interviews, but the format does convey an urgent sense of reporting from the front lines. There's interesting discussion of USAS' origin in privileged rich kids fighting for faraway poor people, and the need to find common ground with those opposing racism and sexism here and abroad. Best of all are the lively individual stories, from the activist on the Nike Truth Tour who calls himself "a recovering punk rocker," to the Mexican factory worker who fights the sweatshop conditions even as she welcomes her job as a way out of patriarchal oppression. --Hazel Rochman