Corporate Giants Easy Target for Activists: Report

A new study of anti-sweatshop campaigns reveals which companies are most likely to become the target of activists.

Researchers found that companies tended to attract the attention of labour activists if they were large, had prominent brand images, or had good corporate reputations. When combined, these factors were especially important.

“Companies that had all of these characteristics were nearly guaranteed to be a target of activism,” lead author of the study and Associate Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University, Tim Bartley, said.

“Social movements are increasingly pressuring companies to act in socially or environmentally responsible ways, so we wanted to see which companies are most likely to be pushed into this role. Nearly all of the large firms in the apparel industry of the 1990s could be credibly charged with benefiting from sweatshops, but only a small subset were named and shamed by activists.”

Bartley said the results suggested that activists chose companies whose visibility in the public and overall good reputation might make them more “shameable” than other firms.

“Activists have enthusiastically adopted the strategy of trying to turn corporate strengths into vulnerabilities,” he said.

The researchers focused on 151 large US lead firms in the apparel, textile and footwear industries. They looked for evidence of anti-sweatshop activism from 1993 to 2000 that was reported in major trade journals.

Bartley said one surprise was that globalisation didn’t seem to play a role in which firms were targeted. Companies that relied heavily on foreign factories were not necessarily more likely to attract activism than firms with less of a global reach.

“Anti-sweatshop activism wasn’t as much a backlash against globalisation as it has been portrayed,” he said.

In a previous study, Bartley found that anti-sweatshop activism did lead to lower sales for specialised apparel and footwear brands, and that major anti-sweatshop events hurt corporate stock prices, at least for a while.

“Companies are realizing that not every campaign against them will make a dent, but some of them will,” Bartley said.

Bartley said the tactics used by activists against apparel firms in the 1990s are now being used against the electronics industry today. He believes many of the results found here would apply to today’s activism.

Bartley conducted the study with Curtis Child of Brigham Young University and their results appear will in the journal American Sociological Review next month.