from the August 31, 2005 San Francisco Bay Guardian
Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops
The University of Michigan Press
By Robert J.S. Ross
Reviewed by Tom Gallagher
American garment worker history, economic analysis of the international clothing industry, and sociology of the global justice movement – Robert J.S. Ross has rolled it all into one book: “Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops.”
That the anti-sweatshop movement’s corporate targets are American is well known – it has confronted stores like Gap, labels like Guess?, and celebrities like Kathie Lee Gifford as publicly as possible with the facts of working life in the mostly third world factories that produce the garments that bear their labels. The book’s estimate that over a quarter of a million of the “new sweatshop” workers are here in the United States may surprise some readers, though. But Ross, a sociology professor and activist, operates under clear definitions of “sweatshop” and one that covers more than a third of the American sewing shops is “a place where workers are paid below the local minimum wage.”
The real surprise then, is not that American garment workers don’t make much money – our minimum wage is generally recognized as a poverty wage – but that American labor law enforcement is so ineffectual that even this low standard is so widely violated. But as Ross explains, the replacement of actual labor law enforcement with a system of garment industry corporate self monitoring goes back the Clinton Administration, when congressional passage of funding for an adequate number of inspectors was deemed politically unfeasible and this self policing approach was considered a viable – or a least realistic alternative. Ross reckons this a key factor, along with increased concentration of power within the industry and a corresponding decline in union power, in the return of the sweatshop to America.
If the elimination of sweatshops is your issue, this is your book. And if it’s not your issue, when you learn of Nicaraguan garment workers earning less than 1% of the price of the jeans they sew, and consider that the US buys 30% of the world’s imported clothing and the European Union another 26%, you may decide it should be.