Glimpses of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

a

Glimpses of the Anti-Sweatshop Movement

In 1995 and 1996, there were a series of major news stories on the return of sweatshops in the apparel industry. These stories were fueled in part by the sensational nature of the cases involved. On August 3, 1995, The Los Angeles Times broke the story of a factory in El Monte, California where roughly seventy Thai immigrants were being held in conditions of virtual slavery. In 1996, Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee (NLC) and the major US apparel union UNITE revealed that Kathy Lee Gifford, a talk show host who had cultivated a maternal persona, was producing her personal line of clothes in sweatshops employing child laborers, both in Honduras and New York City. The reality was that these sweatshop working conditions were nothing new--they had been becoming increasingly common since the 1970s, both in the US and abroad. The salacious nature of the scandals--modem-day slave labor in one case, a maternal celebrity profiting from child labor in another--however, gave these cases attention that more run-of-the-mill sweatshop cases did not. This was a blessing for groups like the NLC and UNITE who had been trying to call attention to the resurgence of sweatshops for some time, with relatively little success (Ross 2004).
Although conditions certainty vary from one factory io another, it is still possible to broadly describe the conditions that prevail in sweatshops. The workforce consists predominantly of young women, whom employers--seeing them through patriarchal eyes-
-view as more dexterous and docile, both more skilled as sewing and less likely to rebel than men. A typical workweek is six days a week, twelve or more hours a day. Pay is

minimal, sometimes not even meeting the legal minimum wage of the country where the factory is located, let alone a living wage. Overtime is usually mandatory--again regardless of what the actual law says. At times, when workers must complete large orders, they are forced to get only a few hours asleep underneath their sewing machines. Factories are generally unsafe and unsanitary. Sexual harassment is typically pervasive. Women may be fired for being pregnant, so that their employers do not have to pay for maternity leave. Where racial differences exist, as with East Asian factory owners in