Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops.

Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops. By Robert J.S. Ross (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. xii plus 396pp. $19.95 Pb.).

When I was growing up buying clothes often led to the humming of the jingle, "look for the union label." We believed it was the way one shopped responsibly. The jingle and the practice of buying clothing with a union label symbolized the link between one's actions as a consumer and decent working conditions, a living wage, and a fair society. We believed it was natural for people to want to live in a world where people were paid well and the production of goods one consumed did not impoverish and exploit someone else. In buying union made goods one engaged in a fair exchange: you gave money to gain clothes and somewhere else someone was paid wages that they spent paying mortgages, going on vacations and participating in the bounty of post-world war II America. In those patriotic years we believed that was what America stood for, and it was that world we were pledging allegiance to each day in school.

Today "look for the union label," is an anachronism. Finding a union label in a clothing store or Wal-Mart is a search even Diogenes would abandon.

Robert Ross's Slaves to Fashion tells the story of the transformation from an America that had for all practical purposes banished the sweatshop to history books to one where hundreds of thousands labor under sweatshop conditions both abroad and at home. Ross's story is one of both victory and declension. He tell how through a combination of successful worker collective action and unionization, support from upper and middle-class allies, and government action and legislation from the 1910-1941, the U.S. was able to end sweatshop labor in the garment industry. But the substantive part of Ross's work is the story of the reemergence of the sweatshop both here and abroad with its characteristic pattern of child labor, long hours, appalling conditions and miserable pay that continues to grow with expanding globalization.

Ross defines sweatshops as places that have some or all the following characteristics: they fail to pay minimum wages, have long hours not remunerated with premium pay, employ child labor and lack adequate benefits. Sadly such places are not confined to third world countries, but increasingly are found within the US, although their presence in the U.S. is tied, Ross argues, with their expansion overseas.

Ross points out that although labor productivity in the American garment industry has outpaced productivity in the general economy, America is still hemorrhaging jobs in garments. In 1950 there were over a million garment workers in the U. S. earning approximately 86% of the average manufacturing wage. Today there are less than 350,000 making less than 60% of the average manufacturing wage. Close to 255,000 work in sweatshops. Despite high levels of labor productivity and closeness to the fashion center, the American garment industry is moving away to regions of the world where unions and legislative protections of workers rights and health are at a minimum. These low-wage, union-free-countries pull down wages at home as manufacturers threaten to move if faced with a union drive or even the possibility of paying minimum wage for the hours worked. In a detailed analysis Ross shows how these conditions have emerged and how prevalent they have become in this country. He also demonstrates the link between the emergence of sweatshops in America and the exploitation of workers abroad.

The old pattern of subcontracting that sweated so many garment workers in the nineteenth century has returned with a vengeance. Large wealthy clothing companies and retailers such as Wal-Mart contract out the production of their clothing line to companies that in turn subdivide and subcontract out. Garment production is a low capital-intensive industry. It is easy to rent or buy sewing machines and a floor of a building, set up a company and bid for the contract to produce clothes. The large name brand companies pit one bidder against another searching for the lowest cost per batch. The producers make money by squeezing their labor. In China, Mexico and increasingly Central America and South and South East Asia producing-companies often from yet some other country pay below living wages to mostly female workers herded into appalling, cramped dormitories and factories. Seen as a stepping-stone to economic development these companies often have the support of or at least complicity of the governments of the countries where the production takes place. The company at the top of this pyramid demands only the lowest price for the goods. Subcontractors look for the cheapest place to assemble the goods. Developing countries desperate for foreign exchange and investment and often under the watchful eye of the IMF or World Bank are reluctant to impose standards of wages, hours or decent conditions on these factories, encouraging a race to the bottom. Workers who unionize and demand a living wage in Mexico find their jobs have now moved to China. To get the jobs back the union and decent wages have to go, for the workers in China have neither.

Arguing with the economic development theorists Ross outlines how rather than stepping-stones to development, sweatshops are on a downward slide to the bottom. Sweatshops do not lead to economic development because as workers begin to organize and fight for better conditions and wages the sweatshops quickly move on to another even more desperate region or nation. In the process the pressure is not upward but downward and that downward pressure moves through the system to more developed countries as well, hence the emergence of sweatshops in the U. S. The evidence clearly shows conditions have not improved in those countries adopting the free-trade sweatshop ladder approach. The success story Asian model for development--Singapore, Korea, Taiwan--practiced a highly controlled directed economy that moved capital out of the sweated industries as quickly as possible.

After looking at the various campaigns in the past and present to confront the sweatshops, Ross argues that, as a hundred years ago, to successfully eliminate sweatshops, there needs to be high levels of unionization among the workers themselves. This means enforceable international agreements allowing workers the freedom to organize as well as putting teeth back into American labor law, it means cooperation between workers and middle-class reformers and consumers, and it means government action both on the national and international level to slow the free movement of goods produced by children or workers paid below a living wage (or not paid at all) in unhealthy conditions.

Robert Ross has written a good book. It should be read by anyone interested in knowing just how the clothing gets on our backs so cheaply. It is a historically informed work dealing with issues we should all be deeply concerned about.

John T. Cumbler

University of Louisville