Tuesday, January 11, 2005
The resurgence of sweatshops
Exploring abuses in America’s garment industry
By Pamela H. Sacks Telegram & Gazette Staff
psacks@telegram.com
Robert J. S. Ross acknowledges that his social and economic agendas could only be realized with a liberal president and Congress.
Mr. Ross, a professor of sociology and member of the faculty of Clark University for 32 years, says, though, that he isn’t the least discouraged by the re-election of George W. Bush and the control of both houses of Congress by conservatives. People who are intensely committed to a certain vision forge ahead in the face of immediate obstacles, he maintains.
“We are keepin’ on,” Mr. Ross says during a telephone interview from his office at Clark. “The trade union people I know are spending no time being gloomy. They are tuning up for the Social Security fight. The AFL-CIO is going to be putting a ton of resources into it.”
A scholar activist, Mr. Ross is redoubling his efforts to effect changes in labor laws and international trade, which, driven in part by globalization, have moved relentlessly in a pro-business, anti-union direction over the last several decades. “This was just an election,” he asserts. “My spirit is unflagged.”
Mr. Ross, 61, got a head start with the publication in October of his book “Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops.” It is a comprehensive examination of the reappearance of apparel sweatshops in the United States. He traces the 20th-century decline and then resurgence of the deplorable working conditions, citing documentation he gathered estimating that in 2000-2001 there were 250,000 sweatshop laborers in America. Now, he says the figure is about 170,000 because of the loss of jobs to other countries. Mr. Ross goes on to explain how sweatshops are a product of unregulated global capitalism combined with deregulation, union erosion and exploitation of undocumented workers.
“A combination of political, economic and social trends has come together to recreate working conditions that are nearly as bad as those of the early 20th century,” he writes. “Sweatshops are back, and they are right here.”
Both personal and professional reasons have driven Mr. Ross’ commitment to the issue.
In the depths of the Great Depression, Mr. Ross’ father, Irving Barrett, quit high school after one year to go to work as a cutter in the New York garment industry. His father’s working life spanned a period of terrible conditions, then unionization resulting in enormous improvement, then regression in the 1970s, a decade when he continued to be employed, but not always in union jobs.
“In those days, a nonunion job paid the same as a union job but did not contribute to the pension fund,” Mr. Ross says. “When he retired, his pension earned him $75 a month. It’s a lucky thing my mom was a schoolteacher.”
Mr. Ross’ scholarly interest in sweatshops was sparked back in 1983 while he was engaged in an analysis of New York City that resulted in an article focusing on the mistaken belief that all residents of rich countries live well. He and co-author Kent C. Trachte made the case that conditions exist in industrialized countries that are similar to those in developing countries as exemplified by the re-emergence of sweatshops.
“That was one of the very first articles to observe the flight of industry from old industrial countries to new industrial countries and comment on the consequences for the old blue-collar working class,” Mr. Ross says.
An early critic of corporate globalization, Mr. Ross would go on to write commentary and articles on the subject. Then in 1995, while he was on sabbatical, it came to him that labor in the rag trade, as the garment industry is called, should be his next big project. “My heart was telling me that this was the thing my mind should do,” he says.
Both his heart and his mind are in clear evidence in “Slaves to Fashion.”
The book is a scholarly yet accessible study, replete with charts and graphs. At the same time, Mr. Ross is frank about his disgust for those who force workers to toil long hours under dreadful conditions for minuscule pay. He expresses his sadness at the toll it takes on workers’ spirits and the poverty they must endure. In his introduction, he uses “hearts starve” — part of a line in a Judy Collins song about sweatshops — as a refrain to describe so emotionally debilitating a life.
He writes:
Hearts starve. You arrive at work in a cramped and mean little shop at seven in the morning. The boss has told you not to punch in until eight. He or his wife screams at you all day — “Hurry up, you idiot! Can’t you sew a straight line? You clumsy dog.” At five he punches your time card, but you work until six or even later past evening and into the night. …The work is boring, repetitive, extremely uncomfortable, but it requires absolute attention. Should your thoughts stray for but a moment, should you wonder how your boy is doing in the first grade or if you might get nice weather to take a walk on Sunday, you will get injured.
Hearts starve. You have to use the toilet, but the washroom makes you nauseous and you are scared of the dark corridor and of catching some disease. The bathroom is filthy. The boss screams if you take enough time to try to clean it yourself.
Hearts starve. There is a course for finishing high school at night in the neighborhood, but you never know when the overtime will come. You can’t plan. If you say no to overtime you’ll get fired. Will it always be like this? Can you ever breathe free?
In “Slaves to Fashion,” Mr. Ross explains that after World War II, garment workers experienced a halcyon period lasting about 35 years. A decline set in as the garment industry changed in structure and gained power. Mr. Ross writes that powerful chains such as Wal-Mart have come to dictate prices to the producers, rather than the other way around, forcing clothing contractors to keep costs as low as possible.
Meanwhile, the federal government has backed off enforcing codes established under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, and the threat of workplace inspection has declined precipitously. All of this has led to the exploitation of undocumented workers, who cannot fight back, Mr. Ross says.
The situation is even worse in other countries.
Globalization has increased the percentage of clothing imports to the United States from 3 percent to 90 percent, resulting in the mushrooming of sweatshops, particularly in Asia and Latin America. It has broken down the barriers to trade without setting respectable labor standards. “Our trade agreements do not compel governments to enforce labor standards, but do compel them to protect investors,” Mr. Ross says. “We make a big thing of intellectual property rights with China but do nothing about labor rights.”
At home, the key to improving conditions is to restore workers’ rights to association and representation won under the Wagner Act of the 1930s, Mr. Ross says. “The slaves to fashion need the right to form a labor union and the right to collective bargaining. There are a number of things that employers do that erode the ability to associate at work.”
Today, only a union label ensures that a clothing item has not been made in a sweatshop, he says.
Internationally, the most effective step would be to change the policies of the World Trade Organization to more evenly balance investor rights and labor rights. Countries would be given time to change their labor laws or face paying a tariff. “It begins to level the playing field,” Mr. Ross says.
Mr. Ross first committed himself to social justice causes more than 40 years ago.
Raised in New York City not far from Yankee Stadium, he attended the Bronx High School of Science with Todd Gitlin, now a high-profile sociologist at Columbia University. Mr. Ross went on to the University of Michigan, where he became an activist in the early civil rights, student and antiwar movements and formed a friendship with ’60s radical Tom Hayden. Both were devotees of social theorist C. Wright Mills, who dissented from the common sociological view of the time that all was right with America. Mills was the intellectual guru to the founders of Students for a Democratic Society, among them Mr. Ross, Mr. Hayden and Mr. Gitlin, who had joined the other two in Michigan for his master’s degree after graduating from Harvard College.
Over the years, Mr. Ross continued his role as an activist, writing speeches for former state Sen. Gerard A. D’Amico and advising Ray Flynn, the former Boston mayor, on economic policy.
After coming to Clark, Mr. Ross and his wife, Marion, a social worker, settled in Southboro, where they raised their two children. Gabriel, 30, is an environmental lawyer in San Francisco, and Rachel, 28, is completing a master of public health degree at the University of Michigan.
For Mr. Ross, the friendships and social issues from his student days are key in his life today. Both Mr. Hayden and Mr. Gitlin wrote glowing endorsements of “Slaves to Fashion.” And Mr. Ross has recently published an article comparing today’s activism against sweatshops to the causes of the tumultuous ’60s.