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This chapter contrasts the predictions of globalization skeptics with international economic analysis regarding the effect of globalization on labor conditions. Skeptics argue that globalization encourages sweatshop labor conditions and increases world poverty and inequality, while economic analysis predicts that international competition produces a convergence of working conditions that reduces world inequality. The chapter makes a key semantic distinction between labor conditions (the actual working conditions and labor rights that workers experience) and labor standards (policy objectives or legal requirements regarding the treatment of labor). The chapter concludes by explaining the questions addressed in the rest of the book.

This chapter considers some dramatic changes in the population of working women by the beginning of the 20th century, as well as continuities of the same ideals that had animated the earliest female industrial workers. It juxtaposes the hopes for self-culture of a generation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who worked in the sweatshops of New York with those of the earlier Lowell workers, and explores the fiction that they wrote and that was written about them. It looks closely at Emma Goldman as an extreme manifestation, both celebrated and notorious, of the consequences of working women's aspirations to literariness and self-reliance. Like Margaret Fuller, Goldman edited a literary periodical, Mother Earth, asserted the romantic primacy of her individual mind, and ignored the sexual restrictions of her time. Like Fuller's working-class contemporaries, she appropriated from the romantic ideals of transcendentalism principles probably not developed with someone like herself in mind. Like those factory workers, too, she was a passionate reader and writer and, like them, she was the subject, sometimes admired, frequently ridiculed, of other people's fascinated fictions.

This chapter accounts for the significance of “external” moral issues, with special concern for labor exploitation and environmental degradation. Standard economic arguments for “sweatshops” do not take the charge of exploitation seriously. The charge can in principle be answered, but not without significant international and transnational efforts to advance prospects for developing country workers. Concerns of environmental degradation potentially pose a more fundamental problem to the very existence of a global economy. It is suggested that its socioeconomic benefits, especially to poor people, are sufficiently important to preserve its basic legitimacy.

Gabriela Saavedra was working in a sweatshop. The dangers of her job increased with the sleep deprivation. There was no leave time at the factory, and there were barely breaks for lunch. She couldn't afford to lose any of the limited wages she earned, so she worked when she was sick. She also worked when Ana Daniel, her 19-month-old toddler, was sick. Despite her mother's adoration, Ana Daniel didn't have a chance at a healthy childhood if her mother remained in the sweatshop where she worked. The anti-sweatshop movement has brought much-needed attention to the draconian conditions under which many adults must labor around the world. During the past 50 years, three striking forces have led to major transformations of family life that offer the potential to either lift families out of poverty or place children at heightened risk. When the three major historical shifts of labor, urbanization, and economic globalization occurred simultaneously, they dropped working families into the vortex of what is in many ways a perfect storm.

During the post-war period, as a broad consensus was thought to have formed in the UK around the welfare state, Hong Kong was widely heralded as an arena in which pre-1945 British capitalist and entrepreneurial ideals continued to flourish. To its defenders, Hong Kong’s laissez-faire practices, or “positive non-interventionism”, made Hong Kong more British than Britain itself. Detractors of colonial Hong Kong, who emphasized sweatshops and squatter huts, confirmed the sharp difference between metropolitan and colonial practice. To Hong Kong’s champions, whose views were broadly hegemonic, Britain’s “benign neglect” was largely responsible for Hong Kong’s transformation from a “barren rock” into one of the world’s great cities. Not only did such views appear in political debates and journalistic accounts, but they also came out in fictional accounts, above all in the novels of James Clavell. At the same time, Hong Kong’s advocates insisted that greater regulation was not only self-defeating but futile; according to prevailing discourse, Chinese people “liked to overwork”. During the 1960s and 1970s, critics of Britain’s welfare state consensus, including Sir Keith Joseph, often used Hong Kong as a foil for critiquing Britain’s own supposed failed economic policies and economic decline.

This chapter examines the public debate surrounding sweatshops within a “human rights” frame. Using existing ethnographies and archival data from ten anti-sweatshop campaigns that center on Central America's apparel industry, the chapter analyzes the consequences that have flowed from the convergence of human rights and workers' movements. It first outlines the main distinctions between human rights and workers' rights movements before considering the tensions that have emerged among the forms of leadership, strategies, and goals embraced by human rights and labor movement activists, and how such tensions have been addressed by solidarity movements. It then explores the consequences that arise when human rights orientations are infused into anti-sweatshop movements. It suggests that solidarity campaigns foster worker empowerment on the shop floor.

This chapter addresses the winners and the losers of the globalization of the apparel industry. Executives and managers of the large retail and apparel transnationals have clearly been winners, while those who have been displaced from their jobs, mostly the women who now work in the industry's sweatshops are some of the losers. Job losses, wage reductions, and sweatshops are a result of “race to the bottom.” The dilemmas of globalization and the “new international division of labor” are then explained. The pressure to open new markets in lower and lower wage regions of the world has led to a Darwinian struggle, which is producing a race to the bottom. In general, it is hoped that this book will be part of a larger effort to ensure that a significant part of the new and emerging global labor force, women apparel workers, will be able to earn a living wage.

Labor standards in less developed countries became a hot-button issue in discussions of trade and economic development in the 1990s. Standards rose to the top of the public agenda because nongovernmental groups in advanced countries—the human rights vigilantes—galvanized consumers to demand that multinational firms and their suppliers improve working conditions and pay living wages in developing countries. This chapter analyzes consumer demand, stimulated by vigilante intermediaries, for corporations to improve working conditions in supplier factories. It examines the incentives that exist for firms to respond to this demand, assesses the role of human rights activists as intermediaries who expose abuses in sweatshops and trigger consumers to demand changes in corporate behavior, looks at the major anti-sweatshop campaigns of the 1990s and their achievements, and evaluates the limitations of activist consumer-based campaigns. The chapter concludes by analyzing when and how human rights vigilante efforts actually do good.

This chapter provides a detailed and comprehensive account of the workers and masters in the Leeds tailoring industry. Many of the new immigrants worked in sweatshops and in the outsourced workshops, which were in many ways an updated form of the domestic system in which all members of the family worked in the home. The workers soon found common cause and combined together to form the first and largest tailoring trade union. Their leader was the socialist Moses Sclare, who was a nationally important figure in the labour movement. Many of the Jewish masters exploited their fellow Jews but an exception was David Lubelski, who supported higher wages and shorter hours.

This essay considers the global dimensions of citizenship, freedom, and emancipation, comparing the emancipations of the nineteenth century to contemporary discussions about citizenship, nation, and modern forms of forced labor. Fundamental questions about labor, freedom, and citizenship posed by the Age of Revolution and the end of chattel slavery remain unanswered: reckoning with them requires rigorous re-examination of the conceptual frames within which empirical questions are posed. Freedpeople in the nineteenth century entered a new world of nation-states in which questions about their citizenship status were sharply posed. The creation of global relations of labor and consumption is constitutive of the advent of modernity, creating the problem of people who are non-citizens in their place of labor. Key concerns with the effects of modern globalization can be traced back to ambiguities in the meaning of “freedom” after slave emancipation.

This chapter looks at two particular strands of environmental and labor advocacy: the anti-consumerist and the anti-sweatshop movements. The record of attention to labor abuses within the history of the consumer rights movement confirms that there has been a longstanding dialogue between organized groups on both sides, but it is equally a history of missed opportunities. In return, labor advocates have been slow to question the dominant materialist lifestyle of a consumer civilization, preferring to promote ethical reforms in consumption patterns that will sustain the existing jobs of goods and service producers. As for the anti-consumer activists who evangelize extensive changes in lifestyle, trading, and modes of subsistence, they tend to see ethical consumption as little more than a way to greenwash the status quo. Moreover, they are not especially sensitive to the immediate needs of the working masses whose livelihoods are tied to the existing system.

This chapter details several key eight-hour campaign successes and losses in the 1890s and their impact on the religious framing among workers and clergy. As the 1880s gave way to the 1890s, arbitration was heard much more frequently as a solution to impasses between employers and organized labor. Prominent businessmen such as Cyrus McCormick and Marshall Field rejected the notion of bargaining with their employees on what they considered to be their right to conduct their business affairs free from interference. Nevertheless, finding ways to minimize class hostilities and prevent the production losses that inevitably accompanied drawn-out strikes and lockouts was becoming a priority for more and more employers. In 1893, Illinois enacted the “Sweatshop Act” that limited the workdays of women and children to eight hours. Moreover, the 1890s is significant as the period in which eight-hour support among Protestant clergy was strengthened as the result of a new social consciousness regarding labor reform.

By the early twenty-first century, surfing was a multibillion-dollar industry. It relied on the neoliberal globalization of the preceding decades, with surfwear corporations employing sweatshop labor in the developing world and contributing to the environmental damage produced by apparel manufacturing. At the same time, it marketed an image of surfing as cool and even rebellious. This industrialization exposed a tension within the surfing community: should surfers embrace their sport’s growth and professionalization or did the industrialization detract from the “purity” of people riding waves? By the early twenty-first century, the organic surfwear brands faced a growing threat from non-endemics such as Nike and Hollister.

This chapter assesses the empirical evidence on the effects of multinational production on wages and working conditions in developing countries. It is motivated by the controversies that have emerged, especially in the past decade or so, concerning whether or not multinational firms in developing countries are exploiting their workers with “sweatshop” conditions—that is, paying low wages and subjecting them to coercive, abusive, unhealthy, and unsafe conditions in the workplace. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 8.2 addresses these controversies in the context of the efforts and programs of social activist groups and universities and colleges involved in the anti-sweatshop campaign in the United States, and the related issues of the social accountability of multinational firms and the role of such international institutions as the International Labor Organization and World Trade Organization in dealing with labor standards and trade. Section 8.3 presents a conceptual treatment of the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on wages in host countries and the effects of outsourcing and subcontracting by multinational firms. Section 8.4 reviews empirical evidence on multinational-firm wages in developing countries together with evidence on the relationship between FDI and labor rights, and Section 8.5 concludes. A commentary is also included at the end of the chapter.

Sometimes voluntary agreements that are beneficial to all parties can still be unethical. This occurs when the benefits of the agreement are unfairly divided among the parties. The benefits of a mutually beneficial transaction might be exploitative, meaning that one party unconscionably takes advantage of the vulnerability of another party. World poverty, globalization, and environmental disasters present a special challenges where exploitation could occur, but also where people’s good intentions might cause them to refuse to make trades that are beneficial for fear of being exploitative.

Launched in 1995 with the discovery of more than seventy enslaved Thai workers in a suburban apartment complex surrounded by barbed wire fence, the movement to end garment sweatshops—led by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center—pioneered the integration of strategic litigation and worker organizing to challenge inequality in Los Angeles. The sweatshop regime was built upon a legal foundation of subcontracting, which insulated retailers and manufacturers from the contractors actually producing clothing. At its most ambitious, the campaign sought to make legal responsibility follow economic power, rupturing the fiction that protected retailers and manufacturers from labor abuses such as those uncovered in the Thai worker case. Chapter 2 shows how lawyers built a powerful alliance with labor and grassroots organizers, won important legal victories in court, and achieved passage of a landmark state law creating manufacturer liability for contract labor violations. It then traces the campaign through the fierce battle against retailer Forever 21, which showed the power of industry countermobilization and ultimately marked the end of the litigation campaign. This outcome underscored a central lesson of legal mobilization in the new economy: Individual enforcement and litigation strategies, even when paired with innovative organizing and media campaigns, faced long odds challenging abuse enabled by extensive contracting and—crucially—the threat of global outsourcing. However, in fusing law and organizing, the anti-sweatshop campaign marked a new beginning in the movement against low-wage work—one that would deploy the tools honed in the garment manufacturing context to target Los Angeles’s immobile service industries.