Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops

Chapter 4: The Era of Decency and the Return of the Sweatshop

4 The Era of Decency and the Return of the Sweatshop withWorld War II came full employment. The apparel industry turned decisively toward factory employment as uniforms made up a larger fraction of its production and women’s styles were simpli‹ed and limited by wartime restrictions on fabric use. Both of these factors would have reduced sweatshop conditions, but in addition there were now the homework bans, the restrictions on child labor, and the wages and hours standards of the FLSA. On top of all these propitious conditions was the growing power of the garment unions within their industries. The War Production Board also helped: defense contracts were given to union plants (see N. Green 1997, 65–67). The Era of Decency: 1940s–1970s With the FLSA as a ›oor and with a large fraction of the industry unionized , the union contracts in both men’s and women’s clothing pioneered bene‹ts in prepaid health insurance and retirement pensions. The full employment during the war period and then the expansion in consumer 86 demand after it afforded apparel workers unprecedented opportunity for income and leisure. Already in 1938 Life magazine had jumped the historical gun and prematurely announced, following a fetching front cover picture of “Garment Workers at Play”: “Thirty years ago the industry stank of the sweatshop and the cruelest kind of exploitation. . . . Still numerous in 1933, the sweatshop is virtually gone today” (Life, August 1, 1938 as cited in Smithsonian Institution 1998). By the end of World War II, even union leaders and commentators began to refer to sweatshops in the past tense. The Union Perspective Publications from and statements by the ILGWU support the view that sweatshops declined for roughly a thirty-year period. As early as 1944, a historian closely associated with the apparel unions wrote in the past tense: “In the old sweatshop days the garment worker lived in an environment , industrial and social, which was a major outrage to every rule of public health” (Stolberg 1944, 299). Stolberg, it is interesting to note here, is associating the term sweatshop with the tenement apartment workshop rather than the later association with abusive labor conditions in any given setting. Even in that case, though, Stolberg’s perception is a kind of evidence: homework was shrinking. In a report prepared for the ILGWU somewhat later, in 1951, Emil Schlesinger1 also spoke of the sweatshop and sweatshop-related conditions in the past tense. His emphasis is mostly on the union’s success at countering the effects of the “outside system of production,” that is, the nonunion subcontracting ‹rms that once were the sweatshops of the apparel industry. Schlesinger remarks on how “in the past” an employer would pay his overhead expenses and then, “with what little there was left, he would pay his workers. If nothing was left, his workers were not paid” (Schlesinger 1951, 6). More clearly, Schlesinger states, “The sweatshops have been wiped out; the days of their existence are among the most shameful pages of recorded history” (90). Schlesinger’s proposition is signi‹cant because he attributes the end of abusive conditions to the union’s control over the subcontracting system. The Era of Decency and the Return of the Sweatshop 87 Life celebrates—a little early—the end of sweatshops. [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] For Schlesinger, the lawyer son of an early ILGWU president, it was not the FLSA, not the expanding consumer economy, but instead control over cutthroat competition that reformed the industry. The mechanism of this control was the joint liability contract and the union’s ability to force jobbers to give work only to union contractors and thus to force contractors to allow their workers to join the union. The former protected wage levels and bene‹ts by making the jobber responsible for them even if the contractor couldn’t make the payments; the latter led to top-down organizing. Controversial among critics of the ILGWU, top-down organizing The Era of Decency and the Return of the Sweatshop 89 A cutter works with his blade. Courtesy of Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University. [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] occurred when the union extracted from the jobber an agreement to give work, for example, sewing already...