Well-informed about international developments in activist initiatives and strategies to combat labour exploitation, Clementina Black was certainly aware of the achievements of the consumers’ league scheme in the US since the 1890s. In 1906 she acknowledged that ‘[i]n New York, where the Consumers’ League is supported by ladies of wealth and influence, it has been more successful’; she adds that ‘the movement is now being copied, with some enthusiasm apparently, in France’. As Black and the Women's Trade Union Association/Women's Industrial Council became disillusioned with the potential of trade unionism to alter women's working conditions, they focused more on the need for influential and official support to achieve changes across the board. While her own socio-economic analysis had led Black to reject the consumers’ league as a workable model to achieve her activist ambitions in the UK, the conclusion that she and the WIC eventually reached had much in common with that of the US National Consumers’ League. She decided that while the goodwill of consumer activism could raise awareness around workplace exploitation, changes to workers’ conditions could only be upheld and enforced if they were enshrined in law. For Black, however, this meant dispensing altogether with trying to persuade consumers that their individual purchasing choices could make any substantial difference. Instead, her new strategy was to confront a broad public with the knowledge that the system in which they made their purchases was inevitably and inextricably linked with sweating practices. This reflects the thinking that Sheila C. Blackburn identified as the third stage in the understanding of sweated labour, following its ‘discovery’ in the 1840s and ‘rediscovery’ from the 1880s: the idea that sweating was an inherent and entrenched part of unregulated capitalism. The direct aim of campaigns to increase awareness of this reality was to put popular pressure on legislators to eliminate the ‘sweating system’ altogether. In Black's view, this would be best achieved by introducing a minimum wage to eliminate underpayment, the root problem of the sweating system.

The most high-profile tool Black and her associates used to raise public awareness of sweating in the first decade of the twentieth century was the sensational ‘Sweated Industries Exhibition’.