Why Don't College Students Give a Shit About Sweatshops Anymore?
There's no better way to change people's shitty behavior than to
convince them that the shitty thing they're doing is uncool.
Everybody wants to be cool! And when I graduated from high
school in Seattle in 2000, anti-globalization and human rights
activists had pulled off a major branding coup—sweatshops were
considered deeply uncool.  It's difficult for activist movements
to bridge the gap between the informed few and the uninformed
many—to get affluent teenagers who may never even drive past a
garment factory to prioritize the needs of (seemingly) remote
strangers over their own convenience—the general assumption
being, at least in my experience, that, oh, other people are
taking care of it. There's a white guy with dreadlocks somewhere
who knows what to do. He'll handle it. And besides, I really
need this tank top.  But somehow, in the late '90s, the anti-
sweatshop movement managed to get a real brand going. "Not
wearing clothes made by slav