No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers

Abstract

This study tells the story of the chasm between the glamour of the catwalk and the squalor of the sweatshop. Few consumers are aware that the T-shirt or the running shoes they are wearing have been produced by children as young as 13 years old, working 14-hour days for 30 cents an hour. A label claiming that the item was manufactured in the USA or Europe is no reassurance that this is actually the case. It could have been sewn in Haiti or Indonesia - or in a domestic sweatshop where conditions rival those in the Third World. label says nothing of how the worker who made it was treated. book reveals: how Nike's celebrity spokesman Michael Jordan earned more for endorsing Nike running shoes than the company's 200,000-strong Asian workforce get between them in a year; How Disney boss Michael Eisner's annual pay and stock options, worth $200 million, are partly paid for out of profits from the sale of Pocahontas and Hunchback of Notre Dame T-shirt made by Haitian teenagers working for less than $10 per week and force-fed contraceptive pills; how campaigning by the New York-based National Labor Committee, the American workers' union UNITE and US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has forced embarassing climb-downs by companies, such as GAP and Wal Mart, caught using sweated labour. Contributors include Jo-Ann Mort and Alan Howard (UNITE); Julie Su, Charlie Kernaghan and the National Labor Committee (edited by Kitty Krupat); Bud Konheim (interviewed by Sally Singer); Mike Piore; John Cavanagh; MacKenzie Wark; Angela McRobbie; Robin Givhan; and Paul Smith. Andrew Ross is the author of The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life and Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits.