Sweatshops
Sweatshops
EARLY OPPOSITION AND REGULATION
Among the definitions the Oxford English Dictionary gives for sweating are: “the practice of doing piecework overtime,” and “the practice of exacting hard work from employees for low wages, especially under a middleman by sub–contract.” These features—piecework and working for a contractor—continue to define contemporary usage of the term and betray its origins in the garment and shoemaking industries of the mid–nineteenth century. Then, as in the early twenty–first century, it was the most vulnerable workers who were “sweated.” That is, it is ethnic, “racial,” or minority immigrants, and mostly women and children, who have worked under these conditions.
THE SWEATSHOP’S BEGINNINGS
The garment industry of the nineteenth century was ideally suited to this organization of production, because the labor–intensive and unskilled sewing work could be subcontracted by manufacturers to an “outside shop.” This might entail scattering the work to several domestic outworkers, or else to small workshops that could be attached to the subcontractor’s tenement housing. The skilled work of cutting and designing continued to be done in the “inside shop” of the manufacturer. In this type of system, the contractor competes for the work by providing the lowest, most competitive bid. Hence, the sole source of profit for contractors stems from the margin between the contracted price and the cost of hiring labor. In other words, the product is “sweated” out of the workers.
The new technologies of production that enabled the mechanization of clothing production in the 1860s also accelerated the process of sweated work. These technologies, including the band–saw cutting machine that cut multiple layers of cloth simultaneously and the sewing machine that replaced hand sewing, led to the creation of ready–to–wear garments and the replacement of skilled male tailors and seamstresses by semiskilled sewing–machine operators working as outworkers. Increasing urbanization expanded the market for ready–made goods and clothing at the same time that the pool of available labor for the industry was growing. Immigrant Jews fleeing eastern Europe, for example, made up large segments of the workforce in both Britain and America. Mechanization also led to the creation of large inside shops with centralized factory production. The historians Ava Baron and Susan Klepp have shown how centralized production in inside shops and decentralized production in outside shops coexisted in various segments of the American garment industry during the nineteenth century. They argue that the terms inside and outside describe processes rather than shops, because even large firms centralized only certain work processes, such as sewing, while others were conducted outside the shops. Thus, both the contracting system and manufacturing flourished under sweating conditions at the end of the century.
EARLY OPPOSITION AND REGULATION
This period also saw the rise of workers’ organizing. In 1900, garment workers in New York City formed the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) to protest poor working conditions in the industry. The union’s first strike was staged in 1909 by 20,000 shirtwaist makers, who were mostly women and children. Another strike, by 50,000 male cloak–makers, took place the following year. Along with a public outcry against sweatshops, these strikes ushered in a new era of industrial democracy. State regulations protecting workers were progressively strengthened, culminating in guarantees of workers’ right to organize in 1935 and the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), guaranteeing a minimum hourly wage, in 1938.
In the decades that followed, strong union membership and government enforcement of garment industry regulations seemed to have led to the abatement of sweat–shops. But in reality garment manufacturers had begun relocating from New York to the nonunionized South as early as the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1970s the job loss was precipitous, as runaway shops continued to move south and southwest, to California, and finally offshore. At the same time, low–cost imports from newly industrializing East Asian countries hurt domestic producers, and in the 1980s the trend by manufacturers and retailers to source production globally continued, with apparel imports surpassing domestic production by the mid–1990s. Special trade regulations have enabled U.S. manufacturers to utilize offshore plants as assembly subcon–tractors (“outside shops”) in Mexico. Under these regulations, manufacturers are allowed to reimport the goods assembled in Mexico, with a tariff charged only on the cost of labor inputs. These offshore assembly plants, or maquiladoras, sew the cut cloth that is provided by U.S. manufacturers and retailers. Cheap labor by young women is abundant in Mexico, and this model of maquila production has spread from apparel to the assembly of shoes, electronics, auto parts, white goods (major household appliances), data processing, and many other products and services.
The globalization of production has led to what sweat–shop critics call a “race to the bottom,” as big retailers such as Wal–Mart, and brand labels such as Nike and Old Navy, source manufacturing from cheaper and cheaper locations, pressuring others to follow suit. It also exerts downward pressure on wages in the United States, where the sweat–shop has reemerged with a vengeance since the early 1980s. One solution is to raise wage levels to a living wage, which would result in only a minimal additional cost to consumers because apparel workers in developing countries earn only 1 to 2 percent of the retail cost of what they produce. Sweatshop advocates, on the other hand, argue that these jobs offer an improvement over alternative work opportunities for Third World workers.
RACE AND ETHNICITY
As in the past, immigrants and women are regarded as the cheapest and most exploitable workers, and they continue to make up the bulk of the garment workforce in the United States. The ethnic composition of the workforce in sweatshops varies by location: in Los Angeles, Latino immigrants outnumber Asian immigrants, such as the Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese; whereas in San Francisco it is the Chinese who predominate, and in New York Mexican and Equadorian immigrants have now joined Chinese to form the vast majority of garment sweatshop workers. These patterns have shifted over time to reflect the changing profile of immigrants in the country. In the early twentieth century, it was Jewish and Italian immigrants who worked in the sweatshops of New York and Los Angeles, and in the 1990s, Mexicans and Chinese replaced the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who worked in New York’s sweatshops in the 1980s. In the face of increased global competitiveness, runaway shops from the unionized Northeast sought new sources of cheap non–union labor in the South. As a result, black garment workers, who had been incorporated into the southern apparel industry in the 1970s, have seen their work opportunities diminish. According to scholars Evelyn Blumenberg and Paul Ong, although blacks made up about 28 percent of the garment labor force in 1990 in North Carolina, then the epicenter of the industry in the South, and were an important source of employment for black workers, the large–scale garment production that was typical in the area has rapidly been diminished by capital flight to offshore production sites. Because of import competition, even brand–name manufacturers who had previously sourced to inside shops with union labor began outsourcing to small shops within the United States. This has led to a dramatic rise of employment in small shops in urban cities, where labor violations are more common and regulations are harder for the government to monitor. Workers dispersed into small workplaces are also harder to organize, and hence less likely to unionize.
For recent immigrants, language barriers, varying educational backgrounds, and a lack of knowledge regarding employment opportunities and job application procedures make working within what sociologists term “ethnic enclaves” (sections of the job market that are dominated by ethnic entrepreneurs and workers) more attractive. Scholars have pointed to the contradictory outcomes of being employed in such enclaves for workers’ perceptions of class. When contractors are immigrants who employ workers from their own ethnic groups, this can lead to super–exploitative conditions of employment, in which
potential class conflicts are displaced by a shared ethnic identity or ethnic solidarity. For example, providing employment in ethnic and linguistic enclaves to recent migrants with little prior work experience, allowing workers’ children into the workplace, advancing workers personal loans, and invoking personal ties with workers through shared ties to their place of origin enables employers to get such workers to work longer hours for less than minimum wages but still be viewed as benevolent benefactors by these workers. In other instances, when hierarchies between ethnic groups exist, such as those between Korean sweatshop owners and Latino garment workers in Los Angeles, class conflicts are permeated by, and expressed through, racial stereotypes. Notwithstanding the importance of race and ethnicity to the sweatshop economy, the problem with viewing sweatshops as ethnic enclaves is that the class relations between contractors and their workers are erroneously analyzed in isolation from the brand–name manufacturers and retailers that drive this mode of employment.
WOMEN OF COLOR
Historically, because it occurred in largely unregulated settings, sweated work was more accessible than factory labor to married women. Factory work demanded a full workday and a long–term commitment to work free of absenteeism or temporary withdrawals from the work–force, especially in the era before legislative provisions for maternity leave were put in place. Sweated outwork, on the other hand, required little training, could be taken up periodically, and did not have to be full–time work because it was paid by piece wages. Moreover, domestic outwork enabled poor and working–class wives and mothers to weave industrial work into their domestic reproductive routines.
The gendered division of domestic labor helps explain why industrial homework has been predominantly undertaken by women, but it does not explain why sweatshop workers, most of whom work overtime instead of part–time, are principally women, and especially women of color. For an explanation of this phenomenon, one must look instead to the ideological constructions of race and gender. The view of women’s work as exceptional and temporary–and hence as supplemental to a male breadwinner’s “family wage”–is a pervasive ideology that validates it as cheaper than male labor. Sweatshop jobs are feminized because they pay less than a living wage, and this sex–typing works alongside the naturalization of the actual skills required for work– such as the notion that women have naturally nimble fingers suited to sewing. Racial stereotypes of Latinos and Asians as hard and docile workers, and of immigrants (many of whom come from ex–colonial countries) as economically desperate with a history of manual and or agricultural labor, also justify their suitability for low–paid and low–skilled work. The precarious social location of immigrants, especially of undocumented workers, combined with their relative lack of knowledge regarding alternative work opportunities, translates into their weaker bargaining power in the labor market.
BACK TO THE FUTURE?
On May 10, 1993, a fire at the Kader toy factory on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thailand, killed 188 workers (174 of whom were women) and seriously injured 494 others. It has been described as the worst industrial fire in the history of capitalism, and certainly in the history of the textile, clothing, and footwear industries. The workers—some as young as thirteen—were assembling toys for familiar American brands such as Fisher–Price and Tyco, and for retailers such as Wal–Mart and Toys ‘R’ Us. Observers have been naturally drawn to comparisons with the previous fire that held this distinction for over eighty years: the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City that killed 146 garment workers, most of whom were immigrant women. Despite the eighty–two years separating these disasters, there are eerie similarities between them. In both cases, workers were unable to exit through doors that were either blocked by flammable work materials or locked by management to deter theft. In Thailand, as in New York, women workers were trapped by the fire and jumped out of windows several stories high to escape the flames. The 1911 disaster impelled consumers to unite with the cause of immigrant women workers, resulting in new workplace health and safety legislation. In 1998, however, the death and maiming of Third World women workers toiling in outsourced sweatshops overseas barely captured the attention of the U.S. media or consumers. The fate of the global sweatshop may rest on conscientious consumption by citizens who want to be more than just price–conscious consumers and who choose instead to pay for workers’ dignity and respect.
SEE ALSO Puerto Ricans
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bao, Xiaolan. 2001. Holding Up More than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948–92. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Baron, Ava, and Susan E. Klepp. 1984. “‘If I Didn’t Have My
Sewing Machine …’: Women and Sewing Machine Technology.” In A Needle, A Bobbin, A Strike: Women Needleworkers in America, edited by Joan M. Jensen and Sue Davidson, 20–59. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Blumenberg, Evelyn, and Paul Ong. 1994. “Labor Squeeze and
Ethnic/Racial Composition in the U.S. Apparel Industry.” In Global Production: The Apparel Industry in the Pacific Rim, edited by Edna Bonacich, Lucie Cheng, Norma Chinchilla, Nora Hamilton, and Paul Ong, 309–327. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Bonacich, Edna. 1994. “Asians in the Los Angeles Garment Industry.” In The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring, edited by Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, 137–163. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Esbenshade, Jill. 2004. Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Louie, Miriam Ching Yoon. 2001. Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Pessar, Patricia. 1994. “Sweatshop Workers and Domestic Ideologies: Dominican Women in New York’s Apparel Industry.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 18 (1): 127–142.
Ross, Andrew, ed. 1997. No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers. New York: Verso.
Ross, Robert J. S. 2004. Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
U.S. General Accounting Office. 1988. “Sweatshops in the U.S.” Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Available from http://archive.gao.gov/d17t6/136973.pdf.
Jayati Lal