TY - BOOK T1 - Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy Y1 - 2014 A1 - Powell, Benjamin KW - anti-sweatshop movement KW - low-wage workers KW - sweatshops KW - third world KW - working conditions AB -

This book provides a comprehensive defense of third-world sweatshops. It explains how these sweatshops provide the best available opportunity to workers and how they play an important role in the process of development that eventually leads to better wages and working conditions. Using economic theory, the author argues that much of what the anti-sweatshop movement has agitated for would actually harm the very workers they intend to help by creating less desirable alternatives and undermining the process of development. Nowhere does this book put "profits" or "economic efficiency" above people. Improving the welfare of poorer citizens of third world countries is the goal, and the book explores which methods best achieve that goal. Out of Poverty will help readers understand how activists and policy makers can help third world workers.

PB - Cambridge University Press CY - New York L2 - eng ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Stitching Together: How Workers Are Hemming Down Transnational Capital in the Hyper-Global Apparel Industry JF - WorkingUSA Y1 - 2014 A1 - Ashok Kumar A1 - Jack Mahoney KW - anti-sweatshop campaigns KW - Fruit of the Loom KW - garment industry KW - sweatshops KW - wages KW - working conditions AB -

Fatal disasters in Bangladesh garment factories demand we learn from recent anti-sweatshop breakthroughs. Beginning in 2007, workers at Fruit of the Loom (FOTL) factories in Honduras built a uniquely successful global campaign. FOTL closed a factory and laid off 1,200 workers in response to workers' efforts to improve working conditions, a textbook move in the industry's “race to the bottom.” But nine months later, after the largest collegiate boycott of a single company in history, FOTL reopened the factory and extended union neutrality to all its Honduran factories. We argue that the campaign, which resulted in a reversal of the transnational's decision to abandon the unionized factory and the direct negotiation between FOTL top executives and workers, provides an unprecedented model for labor to rein in the apparel industry's hyper-mobile capital. Since their negotiated agreement with FOTL, workers have won significant improvements in wages and working conditions, and inspired groundbreaking new campaigns to challenge the transnationals whose products they assemble.

VL - 17 L2 - eng CP - 2 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Towards Joint Liability in Global Supply Chains: Addressing the Root Causes of Labor Violations in International Subcontracting Networks JF - Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal Y1 - 2013 A1 - Anner, M. A1 - Jennifer Bair A1 - Jeremy Blasi KW - activism KW - global supply chains KW - globalization KW - labor rights KW - subcontracting KW - sweatshops AB -

This article situates today’s campaign for “buyer responsibility agreements” with companies like Adidas in a much longer struggle against sweatshops. The downward pressure that pervasive subcontracting networks put on garment workers’ wages and working conditions is not a new problem unique to the era of economic globalization; indeed, it as old as industrial apparel production itself. Yet the scholarly debate about how to combat contemporary sweatshops has been peculiarly ahistorical. One of goals on this article is to remedy the amnestic tone of this debate by reflecting on how the sweatshop problem was effectively solved, albeit only for a time, in the United States. Our case for the contemporary relevance of jobbers agreements unfolds as a three-part answer to a straightforward question: Why are working conditions and labor practices in the apparel industry essentially unchanged despite the widespread implementation of codes of conduct and compliance auditing regimes at the factory level, and what alternative approaches might prove more effective in securing garment worker rights in global supply chains?

VL - 35 L2 - eng CP - 1 ER - 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 -