In his 87 years, Nelson has missed four cotton harvests, all of them during his Navy service in World War II. Nelson and Ruth are happy enough (or perhaps just polite enough) to talk about the past if that is what their guests want to hear about. But they wallow not one bit in ‘‘the good old days,’’ and their minds are opening rather than closing as they approach the ends of their lives. The world is still very interesting to Nelson and Ruth Reinsch. — 4: 665-668
It was not the perils of the labor market but the absence of the market that doomed these generations of workers. — 64: 2069-2070
In U.S. cotton farming, because of the variety of protections in place, disasters happen to cotton but not to people. — 73: 2258-2259
As was the case for slaves, sharecroppers, and Bracero workers, it is not the perils of the labor market that block the path for Chinese textile and apparel workers. Instead, as was the case for these prior generations as well, it is a state-engineered system that limits the ability of these workers to participate in the market as full citizens. — 109: 3224-3226
With a long historical perspective, it seems clear that when the meetings get boring, we have taken a step forward. Boring meetings mean that the radical has become mainstream, and that the establishment has changed its mind about the very nature of right and wrong. The struggles for bans on child labor, or for fire exits or minimum wage or factory codes of conduct, are never boring. But when the fight is won, the meetings get boring. While the battle rages for and against, it is interesting. But when the battle is over and the fight is no longer about whether to have fire exits but where to put them, not whether to have a minimum wage, but how to administer it, not whether to disclose factory locations but by what means and how often—when the establishment has changed its mind and we are just working out the details in (yet another) early morning committee meeting—it gets boring. — 130: 3778-3785
(For a number of years, California has had emissions standards for automobiles that were the strictest in the United States. Companies exporting cars to the U.S. market must therefore ‘‘race to the top,’’ i.e., produce to meet the strict California standards.) — 134: 3879-3881
Or, as Jock Nash, perhaps the American textile industry's most colorful voice in Washington, reportedly advises, when a pack of dogs snarl together, people have to listen. The extent to which the industry can speak with one voice—or snarl together—goes a long way toward explaining its political influence. — 157: 4451-4453
Bernie Brill, former executive director of the Secondary Materials and Recycling Textiles (SMART) Association, told me that used T-shirts are contained in, for example, automobile doors and roofs, carpet pads, mattresses, cushions, insulation, and caskets. — 226: 6060-6061
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. — 255: 6739-6741
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. — 257: 6795-6806
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 continues 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. — 258: 6806-6811
In 2013, Richard Locke published a path-breaking book in which he analyzed nearly 30 years of efforts by Western companies to promote labor standards among their suppliers in developing countries.38 — 275: 7178-7180
More broadly, recent events confirm a central theme of Travels of a T-Shirt: The most vulnerable have more to fear from power imbalances and weak institutions than from competitive markets, and, indeed, markets depend for their survival on a set of basic institutions and values that protect the most vulnerable. The — 276: 7199-7202