The Rag Trade as the Canary in the Coal Mine: The Global Sweatshop, 1980-2010

The global sweatshop has emerged from the integration of super-exploited labor in the Global South with the brands and retailers of the Global North. Beginning in the 1960s, apparel industry production migrated away from the high-wage nations. This trend is linked with the more general globalization of manufacturing, and is accelerated by the immensely concentrated power of the department store chains, especially the big-box discounters like Wal-Mart. All of this, in turn, is a product of the 1960s class conflicts in Europe and the United States, in which workers' wages rose and corporate profits were threatened.¹

Thus the global sweatshop is a dramatic symbol and particular manifestation of an evolution of capitalism in the older industrial regions—from high-price/high-wage competition among a few large firms to price-competitive, low-wage competition that incorporates many more locations on a global scale. Global capitalism makes it harder for workers in traditionally low-wage industries to maintain the decent conditions of the post-World War II Global North such as those briefly obtained by apparel workers. It has also decimated the job stability, wages, and benefits of manufacturing workers in formerly well-paid capital-intensive industries like auto and steel.

The current form of globalization is specifically a product of employers' resolve to evade and weaken organized labor and, so far, it has been successful. That is why the old miners' tell-tale—the canary indicating the presence of toxic gases—is so apt. The vulnerable rag trade is the most obvious sector in which globalization's impact on labor standards has made itself felt—but it is not alone.

Fires

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911—which killed 146 people—is an iconic moment in U.S. social history. Triangle Shirtwaist—one of the largest companies in New York City at the time—has come to symbolize the bad old days of sweated labor. This connection persists, despite the fact that tenement home workshops—not a relatively modern factory like the Triangle company—were what gave rise to the term "sweated labor," here and in Great Britain.² The Triangle firm was a center of strike leadership in 1909's Uprising of the 20000, but it was one of the large firms that did not settle with the "girl strikers" in 1910. The cruelty and abuse to which workers of that era were subject is forever captured in the stories of the infamous locked door during the fire. Piled against the back exit—which was locked, the employer claimed, as a security measure against workers' theft of dresses—were the bodies of women trying to flee the conflagration. After witnessing their sisters' failure to escape, others jumped to their deaths from the ninth-floor windows.

In the thirty years that followed, the scaffolding for worker decency was erected in the apparel business. It had three central pillars of support: the first pillar involved workers' own unions with sufficient leverage to bargain effectively and gain a voice in the political arena. In turn, this allowed the formation of de facto political alliances with social forces outside of the labor movement itself (i.e., with the Progressives of that era). Together, this social bloc was able to erect an infrastructure of law—including social security, minimum wages, and health and safety regulations—that protected workers from the cruelest vicissitudes of the market or whims of their employers. By 1938, Life magazine declared the era of the sweatshop over. In a touching cover picture, the magazine showed two young women on vacation at the Jersey Shore—a paid vacation.

Figure One.

Apparel Workers' Average Weekly Earnings, as a Percentage of Manufacturing, 1947-2009

For a brief forty years, garment workers became part of a larger, political-and-socialinclusion story about manufacturing workers. In the late 1940s, they earned about 85 percent of the manufacturing sector's median weekly wages and, in turn, manufacturing workers were entering the era when their income earned them, at least in popular...