No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers. (Reviews).

Ed. By Andrew Ross. Verso, 1997.

No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers, offers a generous portion of essays edited by Andrew Ross. Published in 1997, the book recaps the "Year of the Sweatshop," in which several huge corporations suffered a series of high-profile, media-savvy exposes, resulting in public disgust at the re-emergence of the sweatshop specter, and causing extreme discomfort of the retail and garment industry. Just a few years before the WTO protests in Seattle struck another blow at the public image of "globalization," the charges against the sweatshop-supported Kathy Lee Gifford label, The Gap, and the Disney corporation brought to the public view the links among the reemergence of sweatshops at home and abroad, the politics of "free trade," and the rights of workers worldwide.

Like the labor and academic conference at New York University that these twenty essays grew out of, No Sweat covers many aspects of garment industries' labor conditions, from tracing the history of the sweatshop, and organized labor's long struggle against such oppression, to the US government's collusion in capital's transnational labor exploitation -- often going hand in hand with imperialist military repression in such nations as El Salvador and Honduras in the 1980s. Kitty Krupat's "From War Zone to Free Trade Zone" explores this angle, while Elinor Spielberg's "The Myth of Nimble Fingers" examines the use of child labor, which is often under the veritable slavery of debt bondage, and the inseparable oppression of women and girls. Alan Howard's "Labor, History, and Sweatshops in the New Global Economy" traces the uneven progress of the struggle against sweatshops, and brings perspective by stating that "the most effective weapon against the sweatshop and the most reliable indicator of progress in the batt le was the organized strength of the workers themselves." The last group of essays deals with bridging the wide gulf between the world of style and the world of labor issues, and is consequently aimed at inspiring cultural critics and fashion designers to ally themselves with the garment industry's working class. Most crucial, however, is the book's major thrust, which is to analyze the labor conditions in the garment industry and to outline in some depth the nature of the various campaigns and strategies against such oppression as the persistence of sweatshops into the 21st century.

Throughout are references to the garment workers union UNITE, a main contributor and supporter of the book, and the National Labor Committee (NLC). The perspectives of the authors mainly reflect the strategies of these groups - indicating a target audience of college students and activists who are involved in the politics of sweatshops and labor struggles through groups such as United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). These strategies generally are geared toward "consumer conscience campaigns, which publicly shame corporations by unveiling their links to sweatshop in highly visible, well-timed media events. These strategies have been most successful in changing the codes of conduct of high-profile brand names like Disney and Gap, but media circuses have their limits: transnational corporations usually have the resources and confidence to ride-out bad publicity campaigns, and they are adept at co-opting anti-sweatshop efforts into their own shallow public relations strategies, often obscuring labor abuses. T hese kinds of single-issue tactics also lead the public to believe that we can tame transnational corporations into behaving ethically, for fear of repercussions from their consumer base, and create what essentially becomes "kinder, gender sweatshops." Lacking in this collection is a more radical anti-capitalist analysis, or even coverage of strategies which place the efforts of workers' self-organization squarely in the center of methods of resistance, with significant exceptions being "New York: Defending the Union Contract" by Carl Proper and "The Myth of Nimble Fingers," which follows the struggles of the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union, made up of women who have endured all sorts of brutality to launch their own, independent union.

Michael Piore's "The Economics of the Sweatshop" offers a very readable description of the economic forces driving the persistence of this institution which has been particular to the garment industry. In "They Want to Kill Us for a Little Money," by Jo-Ann Mort, one woman reports that "Sometimes we'll work thirty-five to forty hours and get paid for twenty hours," in the sweatshops of Los Angeles' garment district. It is estimated that over a third of New York's 6,500 shops, and 4,500 of L.A.'s 5,000 shops, where $1 per hour is not uncommon, are "sweated." The horrific discovery in 1995 of more than seventy enslaved, mostly women, workers--sewing clothes for top retailers--in an apartment building in El Monte, California, is the subject of Julie Su's essay "El Monte Thai Garment Workers: Slave sweatshops." Piore argues that it is historically workers' power through unionization, combined with the support of government regulation, which has diminished the sweatshop conditions over time. Consequently, it is th e decline of these two forces which has allowed for the "return" of the ubiquitous sweatshop, once pushed to the extremes of the underground economy by a strong labor movement, but now resurfacing as a more virulent symptom of capitalism.

Distinct from these domestic sweatshops that mostly persist in L.A. and New York City; but which also exist in Philadelphia, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, San Antonio, and Portland, are the US-export factories in developing countries of the Global South. In these distant manufacturing zones, the sweatshop emerges in the form of large, clean, "fordist"-style factories where overhead costs have increased because long-term production runs, necessitated by distance, lend to higher levels of mechanization. According to Ross, the US General Accounting Office defines a sweatshop as "an employer that violates more than one federal or state labor law governing minimum wage and overtime, child labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers compensation, or industry regulation." He argues that this definition needs to be expanded to apply to any inhumane or unfair working conditions. Enforcing the minimum wage means little in countries where it is routinely set to substandard levels to attract forei gn investment. Ross also soundly warns that there is a danger in making too great a distinction between illegal "sweatshop" labor and legal, low-wage, labor standards--the latter of which is often legitimized by the condemnation of the former.

Paul Smith in his essay, "Tommy Hilfiger in the Age of Mass Customization," gets at the "big picture": we are in the era of a rapidly expanding global economic order, that is, global capitalism. This "globalization," dominated by the North, "is in the process of shifting the place of production to the South or the Third World, with the aim of reducing the costs of variable capital [...] simultaneously, the place of consumption--and of course, capital concentration--becomes ever more centralized in the North itself..." Smith also describes in-depth the new trend of "mass customization" aimed at Northern consumers, Tommy Hiffiger company being a case in point, which highlights the capitalist effort at expanding the consumer market in seemingly infinite ways. The expanding consumption market is one side; the other is the continued effort by capital to "outsource" labor -- Hilfiger clothes are made in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Macao, and Montebello, California.

Something that should have emerged is an analysis of border politics in relation to sweatshop labor patterns in the US. From Steve Nutter's "The Structure and Growth of the Los Angeles Garment Industry," it's dear that the scapegoating of illegal immigrants must end while unionizing efforts are simultaneously supported in order to affect any change for these workers. The fact that NAFTA and other free trade policies open borders to "trade" for corporations, while borders for workers remain surrounded by fear and are more guarded than ever, indicates the kind of "globalization" they have in store for us! Capital can freely cross, but the working class cannot.

Another issue hardly touched in No Sweat is the fact that sweatshop labor, and labor rights in general in the US-export zones, is also a feminist issue. Angela McRobbie's article just briefly mentions this link, and refers to work by Sheila Rowbotham and others who have studied the system exploitation of women workers in the free trade zones and the forms of self-organization their resistance will rake.

At certain points, the book is good about naming the problem of capitalist free market economics, yet falls short by emphasizing only the solutions of "consumer power" for us in the rich western countries. Various Global North campaigns have focused media spotlight on name brands/corporations/manufacturers in order to use consumer conscience" leverage; however, this is but one strategy in rebuilding our organized power. One essay's contemplation of "ethical capitalism" ("Rat-Catching: An Interview with Bud Konheim") is disturbing and a contradiction in terms. When Konheim says "I believe that if capital wins, everybody wins" he has clearly ignored labor history!

With the looming implementation of the FTAA ("Free Trade Area of the Americas" -- think WTO + NAFTA extended to the entire Americas) and workers rights worldwide losing ground, strategies must refocus on workers own organizing efforts. The book quotes heavily the NLC, which has lead the way in becoming the muckrakers of the sweatshop-driven underbelly of fashion's crystal clean exterior, but this focus once again relegates our power to the consumer arena, and reinforces a single-issue perspective that refuses to deal with the larger, internationalist question of capitalism as an economic system, a system that contrary to popular belief (and Margaret Thatcher), is not without its enemies and reasonable alternatives. The emergence of the People's Global Action against Global Capitalism (PGA) as a truly international movement of workers, farmers, and activists is one recent development that offers a glimpse of hope. For, with all the media attention--prone to its own fickle "sexiness" factor--consumer pressure can only go so far. TNCs will always delve further into the realms of an exploitable labor market: as a recent New York Times article (2/6101) attests, Vietnamese women workers discovered at a factory in American Samoa that made clothes for JC Penny were often beaten and starved and kept in prison-like conditions.

And when consumer campaigns do achieve the "model factory" they strive for in order to ease the disturbed consumer conscience? No Sweat would've done well to include an article similar to Pranjal Tiwari's recent "The Impossibility of a Model Sweatshop," (Industrial Worker, Jan/Feb 2001). Tiwari visited such a "model" factory in China which produced footwear for a large brand name corporation and which conformed to the standards most consumer campaigns have been demanding. Yet absent again was any input from the workers themselves as the corporations scrambled to appease western consumer groups with the changeable variables of wage, hours, and even lavish workers' "recreation facilities":

All around there were changes that skirted the issue, the superficial face of reform. Even the compliance with legal statutes on wages and working hours were examples of these, and didn't ever aim at the real problem in this factory and similar facilities all around the world -- the fact that there was never any move toward worker empowerment, and no fundamental change in the relationship between workers and management and the power that one employed over the other. [...] The most fundamental inequality; that of power and self-determination in the workplace, has escaped many organizations dealing with labor activism. It is this inequality that any group dealing with "workers' rights" should address in order to move forward, and to pick effective campaigns that ultimately lead toward the creation of a better society;

SANYA HYLAND is a recent graduate of UMass/Boston's American Studies department, a member of Sabate Anarchist Collective and the Lucy Parsons Center bookstore, a co-editor of The Northeastern Anarchist magazine, and works in a bakery. Contact her at [e-mail].