In conjunction with the February Voices article "Fletcher: Anti-war tactics must escalate," this is the entire interview with Bill Fletcher Jr. conducted in January by Ben Brewer. The Penn State chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops, along with the Student Labor Action Project, are in the second year of their sweat-free PSU campaign. They have been encouraging the university to sign on to the Designated Suppliers Program, which would require collegiate licensees to contract with factories that respect the rights of their workers to organize and bargain collectively and to be paid a living wage. What’s your take on United Students Against Sweatshops and the organization’s tactics? I spoke at one of their conferences some years ago at the George Meany Center [of the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md.]. I think that USAS is a very important organization. Its development was important for the union movement in some interesting ways. The fact that organized labor gave any support to it was indicative of attempts that were underway to change the union movement. I think that was great. USAS wanting to support unionism and being explicit about that was very important. The thing about USAS that is very indicative of something that was emerging in the 90s was a critique of neoliberalism. I don’t think in the beginning they called it that. The phenomenon of the reemergence of sweatshops is not a matter of personal greed of individual capitalists but really speaks to a phenomenon that’s going on globally in terms of the economy: what’s being called the race to the bottom. We see it not only overseas but in the United States as well. USAS was and is able to really bring to the attention of people in the United States the face of neoliberalism. One of those faces—neoliberalism is sort of like a Janus, a multifaced character—one of the faces of neoliberalism is sweatshops. What do you think about the merits of a consumer-based campaign? The idea with USAS is to get college students to feel bad about the fact that they’re buying sweatshirts made in sweatshops. Those students then petition their universities, and the universities make licensees source from factories that don’t mistreat workers. Is that an effective model for dismantling neoliberalism? Is USAS just sustaining international economic disparity and consumerism, just putting a nicer face on it? Workers go from abject poverty to poverty, and we can feel good about ourselves because American hyperconsumerism becomes “ethical.” It’s a tactic, and it’s a proven tactic. Think about the United Farm Workers and the grape boycott, when the struggle of a particular union became a social cause. Absolutely, I think it’s a very useful tactic. It helps to raise awareness. But the thing to keep in mind always is that tactics need to follow strategy, not the other way around. As a tactic, no, it will not dismantle neoliberalism. But it is something that helps to raise awareness about neoliberalism. In that sense, it’s very valuable. It helps to get people, to touch people where they are now, and it helps to get them moving. The work of USAS is not the work of toppling capitalism. And I don’t mean that to be facetious. I mean that it is reform work. It is attempting to address one of the cancers of contemporary capitalism. It is not offering a cure to the cancer. I think that distinction is very important. In the process of struggling around sweatshops, some people’s awareness is going to be raised and they’re going to start asking other questions. That’s when you need other forms of organization. Because the questions people raise about the way capitalism operates—about class, race, gender, about U.S. foreign policy—these are things that in many ways go beyond the current mandate of USAS. So we have to be careful that we don’t destroy something that is a very important united front. But it doesn’t mean that we should be held back from raising these issues by creating additional organizations—I don’t mean oppositional but additional organizations—or conducting educational efforts within USAS that raise some of these broader questions. Where is U.S. labor on the sweatshop issue and, more broadly, on the internationalism of the struggle against neoliberalism? Do you think labor is coming around to the idea that its work must be global, or do you see some degree of protectionism remaining? Both. I think that there’s a very positive trend of growing awareness of the issue of neoliberalism. Rich Trumpka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, talks about neoliberalism all the time. So I think that there is a growing awareness. Is there protectionism? Absolutely. But I think we have to be careful about how we use that term. If workers are fighting to protect their jobs because their plant’s getting ready to close, I don’t think that’s protectionist at all. That’s what workers are going to do. And that’s what they should do. Progressives need to be right there with them, fighting. Protectionism is more a social policy that basically says, “Close the borders. It’s us before the rest of the world.” We have to make a very important distinction: If workers in an auto plant are fighting to make sure their plant doesn’t close, that’s not protectionist—that’s workers fighting against capital. It’s another thing for a union to say that there have to be major tariffs against certain imports from sub-Saharan Africa. This is one of the reasons that it’s really important for unions to be involved in practicing internationalism—not just talking about it—by giving concrete material assistance to workers and other oppressed people around the world who are fighting neoliberalism, but also learning from those experiences and thinking about what we can apply here in the United States. Do you think that’s happening? Is U.S. labor going international? It’s definitely going international. But it’s uneven. So you’ll have some unions that will be focused on joint collective bargaining with unions in other countries, but they will not be talking about U.S. foreign policy. Some unions will talk about sweatshops but will not so much be talking about joint strategic campaigns with other unions. So it’s uneven. But there have been some very important developments, particularly since 1995. At the World Social Forum a couple of years ago, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said, and I’m paraphrasing, “What you activists in the North are doing is great, but the struggle against neoliberalism is first and foremost a southern struggle and it will be lead from the South. How do you see Latin America, which seems to be experiencing a wave of leftism, fitting into the fight against neoliberalism vis-à-vis U.S. labor? With all due respect to President Chavez, I would modify that. What we do in the United States, if we’re successful, makes it possible for countries in other parts of the world to have more freedom of movement. There are different fronts in the struggle against neoliberalism. Latin America is, I think, one of the most advanced places in carrying out that struggle and the discussions about the regional economic blocs are very important. It’s a great model and it’s one that I’m hoping Africans will emulate. The model in Latin America really stands in juxtaposition to the rise of rightwing Islamism in the Middle East and Central Asia, which ends up becoming a very peculiar form of rightwing anti-imperialism—not something we should be emulating. Latin American leftist leaders like Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales seem to be playing a key role in Latin America’s move to the left. What do you have to say about the effectiveness of electoral politics in the states? Is there anything to hope for? I advocate a different sort of electoral strategy in the United States. The November elections were very important in that they were a very devastating repudiation of Bush. And I think that was marvelous. It was done despite the Democrats. What we’re seeing right now that I find exciting is that more and more Democrats—and Republicans—are coming out in opposition to Bush. We need to fan these flames. There’s a different strategy that needs to be followed that involves building an electoral organization that operates both inside and outside of the Democratic Party and is not at this time another party. I say that because of the nature of the U.S. electoral system, which is very undemocratic and makes it very difficult for minority parties to win. But if we build an organization—and there are historical precedents for this—if we build an organization that runs candidates in Democratic Party primaries as well as outside of the Democratic Party when need be, I think that we gain access to an audience that we need to win over. So I believe electoral politics is very important to any kind of progressive change. Wouldn’t such an organization be labeled a spoiler by Democrats? No, because the Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, is not a political party in any way that the rest of the world would recognize. It’s a party bloc. As such, it’s more like a coalition. As opposed to running independent candidates like Nader, I’m saying we run in the Democratic Party. We run like Jesse Jackson did in the 1980s. We put together our own organization, with our own candidates, and we build a grassroots organization that has a clear progressive platform. We’ll get people elected through building that kind of apparatus and with that vision. This is not about spoiler, and it’s not about fundamentally transforming the Democratic Party bureaucracy. It’s more about getting an audience before the people, before the electorate, in a venue where and when people talk politics. What do you expect to get out of the Democrats now that they control Congress? I expect nothing. I demand everything. That’s a slogan I think we should have. They have basically pushed through what they wanted in the House of Representatives. The problem is that it all has to go to the Senate, and then Bush is going to veto most of it. That’s one of the reasons that we need people in the streets. You can’t make change simply through lobbying. And you also can’t make change simply through E-mail messages. You have to have people in the streets, and you have to have people speaking with one another. There’s a big United for Peace and Justice protest scheduled for Saturday, Jan. 27, in Washington, D.C. A contingent from Centre County will be going. You say we need to get people out in the streets. The number of people worldwide who protested in the run-up to the Iraq War was called unprecedented. Yet it didn’t seem to do anything. Have the UPJ protests become just annual events that allow us to feel good about ourselves for walking around New York or D.C. for a few hours, even though nothing actually changes? You have to keep all of this in the historical context. Immediately before World War I, millions of people were demonstrating against war. The war started. The point you have to always keep in mind is that ruling classes very easily start wars, and it’s very difficult to stop them from starting a war because of executive privilege. They can pull the trigger. Antiwar movements are generally successful over the long term. It’s a process of dismantling the prowar consensus. And that’s what we’ve been doing since 2002—working to dismantle the prowar consensus. I was there in New York on Feb. 15, 2003. It was absolutely amazing. I looked out and I could not see the end of the demonstration. So you say, “Well, how could they stand up to this?” They basically call our bluff. They say, “Fine, we’re still going to pull the trigger.” I’m going to be there on the 27th. What the antiwar movement needs to do—I was one of the cofounders of UPJ by the way—is move towards escalating pressure. I and several other people have suggested something we call the first Fridays. In other words, every month on the first Friday—it can be any day, but I’m just calling it Friday—there need to be actions all around the country. The actions could be anything from leafleting to church services to demonstrations to civil disobedience to eventually “stayaways,” where people just decide, “I’m not going to work. I’m not going to shop.” We should look seriously at shutting down malls. I don’t mean doing anything violent. I mean just discouraging people from shopping. At a certain point the protests have an impact, but you have to escalate. You have to build these things in a way so that regular people who are now antiwar who say, “Well, I don’t really want to go to Washington”—OK, well then don’t. Then do something in State College. Then do something in Pittsburgh. That’s perfectly OK. Maybe you get the minister of your church to do a special service. Maybe you do counter-recruiting. Maybe you show up in front of the local office of your congressperson and you do a picket line. There are all kinds of things that people can do. So let’s do it and let’s escalate the pressure. Don’t start off with a tactic that only a few tried and true can do. Start with something that a lot of people can do. What can be done to repair some of the damage done to labor in eight years of Bush? More importantly, what will the Democrats do to repair that damage? It really depends on what we do. The thing you have to keep in mind is that these individuals are subject to pressure. If we sit back and do nothing, they’re going to do the worst. That’s just the reality. In terms of labor, what the Democrats could do is pass labor law reform. There is legislation to make it easier for workers to express their right to organize. That’s very important. But having said that, what really needs to happen is a transformation within the union movement, a transformation in the way that we understand unions: what the union does, who its constituency happens to be. That’s what we really have to concentrate on. Yeah, we need to push the Democrats to support labor law reform, but labor law reform in the absence of a transformed movement is not going to mean anything. Back to campus. Are we witnessing the demise of labor studies? Yes. I think that it’s happening because of the weakening of the labor movement. There is a one-to-one correspondence. When you have a weak labor movement you have weak labor studies, or none. To simply demand that states reinstitute labor studies programs is a fruitless venture. As we rebuild the movement, we will have a basis to bring about renewed labor studies. What do you plan to talk about when you’re here? U.S. foreign policy post 9/11.