Although efforts to adopt decent labor standards through free trade agreements are stymied on the international level, activists in the United States are quietly making progress on the local level. At last count, 39 cities, 15 counties, and eight states have adopted policies expressed under a common banner: No taxpayer money for sweatshop goods!

These policies are promoted by a nongovernmental network, Sweatfree Communities, founded in 2003 by anti-sweatshop activists who had been working separately in Maine, Minnesota, New York, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. They now work together with a three-prong strategy:

• Petitioning the government entity nearest and most responsive to them;
• Concentrating their efforts on an important function of that government: the procurement of supplies; and
• Aiming initially at a specific goal in public procurement: uniforms and other apparel for firefighters, police officers, other public workers, and prisoners.

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