Jay R. Mandle

The Student Anti-Sweatshop Movement: Limits and Potential

This article analyzes the student anti-sweatshop movement in the United States and its efforts to employ codes of conduct to secure improved conditions for workers in the international apparel industry. After discussing the globalization of that industry, the article examines the content of the codes of conduct that have been suggested by the student movement, on the one hand, and the members of the Apparel Industry Partnership, on the other. It concludes with a critique of the strategy of relying on codes of conduct and suggests that the pursuit of workers rights should be sought in a strengthened International Labor Organization.

Reconciling Development, Global Climate Change, and Politics

There is no reason to despair about the worlds ability to reduce the environmental damage due to the use of fossil fuels. Growing nations have solved similar problems before, argues the author. But it will take serious government commitment to investment in a search for new technologies. This, the United States may not be willing to do.

The Political Market

This paper explores the economics of electoral democracy, an almost entirely neglected subject. Running for office necessitates resources. But students of democracy have had almost nothing to say about how much money should be spent by candidates or where that money should come from. As a result, there is a gaping void in the theory of democracy. Joseph A. Schumpeter used a market analogy in his discussion of the electoral process, but even he did not discuss how electoral campaigns are to be paid for. In fact, the few citizens who largely fund campaigns for office in the United States purchase non-rivalrous influence. They obtain the ability to shape the policies that affect all citizens. In this way, political equality is undermined. The paper concludes that achieving a more representative political system can best be attained by treating political campaigns as a public good.

Continuity and Change: The Use of Black Labor After the Civil War

Recent work on the economic history of the Southern United States has tended to argue that with emancipation, a considerable degree of autonomy and freedom was achieved by the former slaves. Gavin Wrights (1986) views in this regard are representative. Wright denies that Blacks remained in the South because of heavy-handed legal barriers or debt peonage or the convict labor system (p. 91). The South, he writes, was not a prison and there was no smoking gun to keep blacks and poor whites in the region (p. 85). Efforts to recreate slavery, according to Wright, did not succeed. In this, Wright goes on, sharecropping, the new organizational form widely adopted after the Civil War in Southern agriculture, was not a system of coercion. Instead it represented a balance between the freedmens desire for autonomy and the employers interest in extracting work effort and having labor when it was needed (p. 86). Wright concludes that all things considered, blacks made remarkable progress in accumulating wealth in the post bellum South (p. 101). In contrast, Gerald David Jaynes (1986) is not as sanguine. He details a list of impediments to labor mobility which were present in the region and concludes that

Basketball, civil society and the post colonial state in the Commonwealth Caribbean.

In this paper the autonomous voluntary organizations of basketball leagues in ten countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean are examined. An index reflecting the strength of basketball organization, play and popular support in each country was constructed and and a framework to account for these differences was employed. The authors suggest that the significance of basketball organization lies in the fact that voluntary associations are poorly developed in the region. West Indian scholars have tied the stunted development of a civil society in the region to the historically rooted overly centralized political structures characteristic of Caribbean states. The weakness of civil society has restricted the democratic content of West Indian societies, despite the presence of formal democratic institutions. Finally, the implications of the existence and differential strength of basketball associations for the development of civil society and participatory democracy in the Anglophone Caribbean are explored.

Political struggle and West Indies cricket

[First paragraph]An Area of Conquest: Popular Democracy and West Indies Cricket Supremacy. HILARY McD BECKLES (ed.). Kingston: Ian Randle, 1995. xviii + 154 pp. (Paper n.p.)Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture. HILARY McD BECKLES & BRIAN STODDART (eds.). Kingston: Ian Randle, 1995. xii + 403 pp. (Paper n.p.)We discovered crickets importance in the English-speaking Caribbean nearly thirty years ago when we took up our first post in the West Indies. Exploring the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies, we were alarmed to observe so many people who appeared to be hearing-disabled. Wherever we went we found people with ear-pieces who were slightly distracted and at the same time prone to violent mood swings, ranging from the depths of despair to enormous elation. Uncertain about the meaning of what we observed, but reluctant, as newcomers, to reveal our ignorance of public health problems in the region, we delayed inquiring about hearing disabilities until we could confide our concerns to a trusted friend. At first convulsed with laughter, she finally recovered sufficiently to assure us that the people of the West Indies did not suffer disproportionately from hearing loss. Rather, the large numbers of people with ear-pieces were listening to a cricket test match!