(Dis)Assembling Rights of Women Workers Along the Global Assembly Line: Human Rights and the Garment Industry Symposium: Political Lawyering: Conversations on Progressive Social Change

Some observers would like to explain away sweatshops as immigrants exploiting other immigrants, as cultural, or as the importation of a form of exploitation that normally does not happen here but occurs elsewhere, in the Third World. While the public was shocked by the discovery at El Monte, garment workers and garment worker advocates have for years been describing abuses in the garment industry and have ascribed responsibility for such abuses to manufacturers and retailers who control the industry. Sweatshops, like the one in El Monte, are a home-grown problem with peculiarly American roots. Since the inception of the garment industry, U.S. retailers and manufacturers have scoured the United States and the rest of the globe for the cheapest and most malleable labor-predominantly female, low-skilled, and disempowered-in order to squeeze out as much profit as possible for themselves. Along with this globalization, the process of subcontracting, whereby manufacturers contract out cutting and sewing to contractors to avoid being considered the employer of the workers, has made it extremely difficult for garment workers in the United States to assert their rights under domestic law. This Article examines the challenges garment workers in the United States face in asserting their rights in the global economy and investigates how transnational advocacy can be deployed to compensate for the inability of U.S. labor laws to respond to problems with international dimensions. Using a purely domestic U.S. legal framework, advocates can attack the problem of transnational corporations\u27 (TNCs) subcontracting in the United States. Such efforts, however, will have limited effect because of the global nature of the garment industry. Most efforts to change the structure of the garment industry have occurred within the limitations of U.S. law, even while there has been a predominant failure of the U.S. legal system effectively to utilize a human rights framework. While the nation-state has traditionally been viewed as the locus for the development and enforcement of rights-creating norms, it cannot adequately respond to all of the dynamics that now arise from markets that cut across borders. Violation of workers\u27 rights on the global assembly line calls for strategies that are transnational, and this Article highlights past successes and suggestions in this vein. Because of the difficulty of restraining TNCs in a global economy, no strategy used in isolation will be successful. We present here alternative strategies that can be used in multiple and flexible ways in the struggle for human rights

(Dis)Assembling Rights of Women Workers Along the Global Assembly Line: Human Rights and the Garment Industry Symposium: Political Lawyering: Conversations on Progressive Social Change

Some observers would like to explain away sweatshops as immigrants exploiting other immigrants, as cultural, or as the importation of a form of exploitation that normally does not happen here but occurs elsewhere, in the Third World. While the public was shocked by the discovery at El Monte, garment workers and garment worker advocates have for years been describing abuses in the garment industry and have ascribed responsibility for such abuses to manufacturers and retailers who control the industry. Sweatshops, like the one in El Monte, are a home-grown problem with peculiarly American roots. Since the inception of the garment industry, U.S. retailers and manufacturers have scoured the United States and the rest of the globe for the cheapest and most malleable labor-predominantly female, low-skilled, and disempowered-in order to squeeze out as much profit as possible for themselves. Along with this globalization, the process of subcontracting, whereby manufacturers contract out cutting and sewing to contractors to avoid being considered the employer of the workers, has made it extremely difficult for garment workers in the United States to assert their rights under domestic law. This Article examines the challenges garment workers in the United States face in asserting their rights in the global economy and investigates how transnational advocacy can be deployed to compensate for the inability of U.S. labor laws to respond to problems with international dimensions. Using a purely domestic U.S. legal framework, advocates can attack the problem of transnational corporations\u27 (TNCs) subcontracting in the United States. Such efforts, however, will have limited effect because of the global nature of the garment industry. Most efforts to change the structure of the garment industry have occurred within the limitations of U.S. law, even while there has been a predominant failure of the U.S. legal system effectively to utilize a human rights framework. While the nation-state has traditionally been viewed as the locus for the development and enforcement of rights-creating norms, it cannot adequately respond to all of the dynamics that now arise from markets that cut across borders. Violation of workers\u27 rights on the global assembly line calls for strategies that are transnational, and this Article highlights past successes and suggestions in this vein. Because of the difficulty of restraining TNCs in a global economy, no strategy used in isolation will be successful. We present here alternative strategies that can be used in multiple and flexible ways in the struggle for human rights

Evaluating the Potential Effects of Deicing Salts on Roadside Carbon Sequestration

This project sought to document patterns of road deicing salts and the effects of these salts on the amount of carbon being sequestered passively along Montana Department of Transportation roads; it was designed collaboratively with a related roadside project that tested three different highway right-of-way management techniques (mowing height, shrub planting, disturbance) to determine whether they have the capacity to increase soil organic carbon. Our sampling did not reveal elevated salt levels at any of the nine locations sampled at each of the three I-90 sites. The greatest saline concentrations were found at the sample locations farthest from the road. This pattern was consistent across all three sites. The range of soil organic matter (SOM) was broad, from ~1% to >10%. Generally, SOM values were lowest adjacent to the road and highest farthest from the road. We found no or weak evidence of a relationship between our indices of soil salinity and SOM levels, with electrical conductivity, exchangeable calcium, and cation exchange capacity. Results imply that if road deicing salts are altering patterns of roadside SOM and potential carbon sequestration, this effect was not captured by our experimental design, nor did deicing salts appear to have affected roadside vegetation during our most recent sampling effort. Our findings highlight the value of experimentally separating the multiple potentially confounding effects of winter maintenance operations on roadside soils: roads could focus the flow of water, salts, and sands to roadside soils. How these types of mass inputs to roadside soils might influence medium- or long-term carbon dynamics remains an open question, but their fuller characterization and possible flow paths will be essential to clarifying the role of roadside soils in terrestrial soil organic carbon sequestration strategies

The Parcel as a Whole: Defining the Relevant Parcel in Temporary Regulatory Takings Cases

In regulatory takings cases, courts must look at the “parcel as a whole” rather than individual property interests to determine whether a taking has occurred. The Supreme Court, however, has not clarified how exactly the relevant parcel should be defined. The Federal Circuit’s recent decision in CCA Associates v. United States highlights the confusion surrounding the parcel as a whole. It also highlights the continuing need to clarify how the relevant parcel should be defined in temporary regulatory takings cases. This Comment analyzes the parcel as a whole in temporary regulatory takings cases, specifically those involving lost income. It argues that the relevant parcel should not be measured by the property’s entire lifetime value, as the Federal Circuit decided in Cienega Gardens v. United States (Cienega X) and ultimately reaffirmed in CCA Associates. Neither Supreme Court jurisprudence nor standard economics supports this interpretation of the parcel as a whole. Instead, this Comment argues that the relevant parcel should be determined by the owner’s investment in the property in consideration with principles of fairness and justice. This approach harmonizes Supreme Court jurisprudence and standard economics. It also achieves uniformity and equitability in temporary regulatory takings cases involving lost income

The Patentability of Digital Manufactures as 3D Printing Expands Into the 4D World

Technological advances have always been supported by a robust patent system that encourages disclosure of inventions by providing protection to the inventor. Society has benefitted from this system, which has relied on a definition of manufacture that has essentially remained unchanged for over 200 years. However, with the advent of digital technologies, and in particular Four-Dimensional Printing, courts have been inconsistent in evaluating the patentability of such inventions. Recent Supreme Court and Federal Circuit decisions have indicated that some software may be eligible for patent protection. This is particularly important for 4D printing wherein the manifestation of the printed product is inherently connected to the software. This Note explains why the patent system should recognize CAD files, particularly as they relate to 4D printing, as patentable subject matter under Section 101 of the Patent Act of 1952

Sew speak! Needlework as the voice of ideology critique in The Scarlet Letter , A New England nun, and The Age of Innocence

In the Nineteenth Century, needlework, and embroidery in particular, became a signifier of feminine identity. Needlework was such a significant part of women’s lives and so integral to the construction of femininity in nineteenth-century America that both pictoral and narrative art demonstrate numerous representations of women embroidering. The sheer volume of these representations in the Nineteenth Century suggests that the practice of embroidery provides a way of speaking for women—a representation of the voice of subjectivity silenced by patriarchal ideology. Because needlework serves as a signifier of ideal femininity, it provides uniquely fruitful and previously unexplored opportunities for investigating how women negotiated with the constraints of ideal femininity, especially as represented in fiction. Indeed, needlework in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “A New England Nun,” and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence reveals a character at odds with patriarchal ideology. In each of these three texts, the representation of the embroidering woman— Hester Prynne, Louisa Ellis, and May Welland—not only reveals the “falseness” of the gender ideology constructed around her but also suggests that the practice of embroidery in fiction serves to critique that ideology, opening a space of possibility in which women can negotiate their participation in or refusal of the ideological constraints of gender

Dismantling Structural Inequality: Lock Ups, Systemic Chokeholds, and Race-Based Policing - A Symposium Summary

The prominence of the carceral state in American society serves to undermine basic principles of democracy and justice, disproportionately displacing people of color and excluding them from all viable avenues of citizenship