|
American Sweatshops, Here and Abroad
Trade policy and global economics have caused vast changes in the apparel and textile industries, with dramatic implications for U.S. businesses and customers.
Scholar Ellen Israel Rosen spent years developing her new book, Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry. It chronicles the re-emergence of sweatshops in the United States and their expansion abroad.
The winners of the globalization of the apparel industry are, according to Rosen, the "executives and managers of the large retail and apparel transnationals." The losers are low-paid employees working in difficult and often dangerous conditions. And most of those workers are women.
Between 1992 and 1996 -- while salaries and profits of apparel CEOs went higher and higher -- some 300,000 jobs were lost in the U.S. apparel industry. The workers who remain are pressured to produce additional goods faster, or face the threat of more jobs moving outside U.S. borders.
Rosen writes: "Americans who live in Seattle may be more likely to support the free trade agenda than textile workers and their families who live in eastern states, where apparel firms are closing their doors only to reopen them in Mexico, the Carribean, Central America, or China."
Her book seeks to answer a basic question: How can globalization promote social and economic justice?
Rosen looks not only at the role of trade policy, but also the history of policies toward the apparel industry -- including Cold War politics and the reconstruction of Pacific Rim economies following the end of World War II.
Few question the value of producing attractive, affordable clothing so that -- as Rosen puts it -- "more of the world's people can be adequately and fashionably dressed."
But while corporations have a mandate to profit from investments and enterprises, Rosen argues that new ways are needed to handle international trade and investment to provide apparel workers a good living wage.
|
