Customer Reviews

Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops

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This is the most comprehensive and up to date book I know of about sweatshops in the U.S. and worldwide. It is must reading for anti-sweatshop activists and anyone else interested in this ugly seamy side of globalized capitalism.

Ross endorses the U.S. Government Accounting Office's definition of a sweatshop as "a business that regularly violates both wage or child labor and safety or health laws." Employing that definition, he concludes that there are about a quarter million sweatshop workers in the United States. Many are immigrants in the apparel industry.

He shows that sweatshops were rampant in the U.S. economy at the beginning of the twentieth century. As a result of the 1937 Fair Labor Standards Act, they declined greatly from the 1940s to the 1970s. But then a confluence of factors--including globalization and industrial deregulation--resulted in the resurgence of sweatshop employment in the 1980s that has continued to today.

He blames the international expansion of sweatshops on deregulated global capitalism that has produced a competitive race to the bottom among low wage countries. The last part of the book focus on the anti sweatshop movement and the development of effective labor standards.

ross's 337 pages is seemingly daunting with charts, statistics, historical and conceptual overview, until you read it. it is very accessible even for someone like me who is a new comer to the issue. it is written simply and non-technically. i didn't know anything, not really, about sweat shops. but from the beginning ross takes on a very personal approach by stating his reasons for writing this book - his parents were garment factory workers!

he doesn't blame the re-introduction of sweatshops in the states and around the world on a single issue like global capitalism, which he does cite as the greatest contributor to it, but maps out a complex web of lack of uninization, lack of law-enforcement, and political philosophies.
it is an extensively researched book that has helped me to understand the scope and the nature of the problem, that is violation of human dignity through unethical practice of power.

the title is a bit misleading. it doesn't have much to do about the asthetics, marketing, or the cultural psychology of fashion. fashion is used in much more literal way.