TY - CHAP T1 - Evolving Labor Relations in the Women's Apparel Industry T2 - New Directions in the Study of Work and Employment Y1 - 2008 A1 - Quan, K. ED - C. J. Whalen KW - child labor KW - collective bargaining KW - garment workers KW - health and safety regulations KW - ILGWU KW - International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union KW - labor relations KW - outsourcing KW - sweatshops KW - women's apparel industry KW - women’s suffrage AB -

[Excerpt] Labor relations are in essence the power relationships between labor and capital. Various labor market institutions serve that power relationship, and in the twentieth century labor unions arose as the most important institution for workers to organize and bargain collectively for power. Among these unions, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) was an early champion of issues such as the eight-hour workday, the abolition of child labor, health and safety regulations, and women’s suffrage. For tens of thousands of immigrant women and men, the union became the ticket to the American dream – raising penniless sweatshop workers to proud middle-class citizens. The key to the ILGWU’s success was its ability to parlay public outrage over nineteenth-century-sweatshop conditions into a unique, triangular collective bargaining relationship between jobbers, contractors, and the union. As a result, by the 1950s garment workers were the second-highest-paid production workers in the country. In spite of these achievements, in the 1960s we began to hear the ILGWU protest outsourcing of apparel jobs to foreign countries where workers toiled under conditions similar to the sweatshops that the union had helped eradicate. In 1995 we even heard of Los Angeles garment workers who had been enslaved – smuggled in from Thailand under false pretenses, held under armed guard behind razor-wire fences, and paid less than 50 cents per hour. What happened to the power that led to such impressive union victories only a few decades earlier?

JA - New Directions in the Study of Work and Employment PB - Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. CY - Northampton, MA L2 - eng ER -