Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Fasanella’s painting “Lawrence 1912, the Bread and Roses Strike” may be viewed online at . 2. One scholar claims the children were sent away so their cries of hunger would not weaken their mothers’ resolve (Harney 1999). 3. Kerri Harney (1999) ‹rst used Lincoln’s phrase “mystic chords” in this context. 4. A combing of the newspapers of the period—recall that photojournalism was alive and well in that era—reveals nary an indication, and the slogan appears in no literature of the day (Sider 1996), nor is it used verbatim in the Italian language poems of the strike’s orator–poet Arturo Giovannitti. I report here the trenchant scholarship of Harney (1999), whose work was an undergraduate honors thesis. She began her research by following up the search for evidence undertaken by Gerald Sider (1996). 5. The quote is from Kenneth MacGowan, “Giovannitti: Poet of the Wop,” Forum (October 1914): 609, discussing the poet–orator Arturo Giovannitti, who played a leadership role in the Lawrence strike. It is taken from Harney 1999. 6. This quote is from a childhood memory of a Folkways record album liner. I am not able to document it. Chapter 1 1. The great labor historian John R. Commons referred in 1901 to the “contractor” or “sweater” as the “organizer” of work often done in homes by immigrants (in Stein 1977, 44–45). Usage is not consistent, for others refer to the “sweater” as the “home worker” (Garnett 1988, 31). 2. Outerwear refers to clothing that is not underwear, excludes certain tailored garments . See chap. 6, note 5. 3. See “‘Knee Pants’ at 45 cents a dozen—a Ludlow Street Sweater’s Shop” in Riis 1890. Available at . 4. But it would not have provided income above a more appropriate and higher poverty line. See later in this chapter for a discussion of different poverty criteria. 5. What is big? Christopher Jencks, re›ecting on the partisan or interested use of the estimates of homelessness, thought 1 million was the magic number for an American social 339 problem. My estimate for the apparel industry fails this test; for all industries in the nation, I have no estimate, but, of course, labor abuse as I have de‹ned sweatshops would have to be much more than 1 million: the issue would be where it is as concentrated as apparel. As discussed later in this chapter, sweatshop labor is nowhere as concentrated as it is in apparel work, with the possible exception of restaurants and agriculture. See Jencks 1994, 2–4. 6. Value-added is an economic concept that denotes the estimated value, in dollars, that is added to a product or material at each stage of its manufacture or distribution. 7. The GAO sample of violators was not representative because its sample was composed of the violators known to the DOL in the two states as a result of their investigations. 8. “There is no theoretical reason to exclude from the informal economy the unrecorded practices of large corporations, particularly since they have close linkages with the growth of other informal activities” (Castells and Portes 1989, 13, 15). When seventy-one workers, lured into slavery from Thailand, were discovered in a slave factory in El Monte, California, in 1995, the list of retailers for which the clothing was bound was a who’s who of mainstream (and upscale) retailing in California, including Neiman Marcus and the Mays chain (Su 1997). 9. The method they used is called “input-output” analysis. 10. The EDD Tax Branch is one of the largest tax collection agencies in the nation and handles all the administrative and enforcement functions for audit and collection of unemployment insurance, disability insurance, employment training tax (ETT), and personal income tax (PIT) withholding. 11. The fact that there were so many violations for each violator ‹rm makes it possible to use minimum wage violations as an indicator variable for multiple labor law violations. This is de facto the way the DOL treats the matter in its press releases. 12. Voluntary compliance monitoring is considered a failure by labor rights advocates. Despite, apparently, boosting compliance rates, almost half of those allegedly monitored are still labor law violators. Notoriously, among the ‹rst ‹rms to claim that it monitored its contractors was the infamous Guess? jeans company, which was later found to have repeat violators in its contractor chain (Greenhouse 1997). 13. These estimates are derived from the method outlined in detail in appendix 1. 14...