Beyond Sweatshops

Beyond Sweatshops PDF Author: Theodore H. Moran
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780815798620
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Images of sweatshop labor in developing countries have rallied opponents of globalization against foreign direct investment (FDI). The controversy is most acute over the treatment of low-skilled workers producing garments, footwear, toys, and sports equipment in foreign-owned plants or the plants of subcontractors. Activists cite low wages, poor working conditions, and a variety of economic, physical, and sexual abuses among the negative consequences of the globalization of industry. In Beyond Sweatshops, Theodore Moran examines the impact of FDI in manufacturing on growth and welfare in developing countries, and explores how host governments can take advantage of the contributions of foreign investment while avoiding the hazards to lower-skilled workers. He traces case studies of countries that have managed to produce steady improvement in worker treatment at plants exporting garments, footwear, and other labor-intensive products. The first part of the book examines multilateral proposals designed to place a floor under the treatment of workers around the world, contrasting a WTO-based system to enforce labor standards with "voluntary" arrangements, including corporate codes of conduct, certification organizations, and "sweatshop free" labeling. It explores the pros and cons of adding a "living wage" requirement to the ILO's core labor standards. The second part of the book presents data that significantly broadens our understanding of FDI. By analyzing the evidence from a variety of developing countries—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—Moran demonstrates that most FDI goes to industrial sectors that employ trained workers who are not easily exploited. The flow of FDI to plants that produce electronics, auto parts, industrial equipment, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment, paying production workers two to five times more than what is found in lower-skilled operations, is twenty-five times the flow to garment, textile, and footwea

Beyond Sweatshops

Beyond Sweatshops PDF Author: Theodore H. Moran
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780815798620
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
Images of sweatshop labor in developing countries have rallied opponents of globalization against foreign direct investment (FDI). The controversy is most acute over the treatment of low-skilled workers producing garments, footwear, toys, and sports equipment in foreign-owned plants or the plants of subcontractors. Activists cite low wages, poor working conditions, and a variety of economic, physical, and sexual abuses among the negative consequences of the globalization of industry. In Beyond Sweatshops, Theodore Moran examines the impact of FDI in manufacturing on growth and welfare in developing countries, and explores how host governments can take advantage of the contributions of foreign investment while avoiding the hazards to lower-skilled workers. He traces case studies of countries that have managed to produce steady improvement in worker treatment at plants exporting garments, footwear, and other labor-intensive products. The first part of the book examines multilateral proposals designed to place a floor under the treatment of workers around the world, contrasting a WTO-based system to enforce labor standards with "voluntary" arrangements, including corporate codes of conduct, certification organizations, and "sweatshop free" labeling. It explores the pros and cons of adding a "living wage" requirement to the ILO's core labor standards. The second part of the book presents data that significantly broadens our understanding of FDI. By analyzing the evidence from a variety of developing countries—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—Moran demonstrates that most FDI goes to industrial sectors that employ trained workers who are not easily exploited. The flow of FDI to plants that produce electronics, auto parts, industrial equipment, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment, paying production workers two to five times more than what is found in lower-skilled operations, is twenty-five times the flow to garment, textile, and footwea

Beyond Sweatshops

Beyond Sweatshops PDF Author: Theodore H. Moran
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780815798620
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
Images of sweatshop labor in developing countries have rallied opponents of globalization against foreign direct investment (FDI). The controversy is most acute over the treatment of low-skilled workers producing garments, footwear, toys, and sports equipment in foreign-owned plants or the plants of subcontractors. Activists cite low wages, poor working conditions, and a variety of economic, physical, and sexual abuses among the negative consequences of the globalization of industry. In Beyond Sweatshops, Theodore Moran examines the impact of FDI in manufacturing on growth and welfare in developing countries, and explores how host governments can take advantage of the contributions of foreign investment while avoiding the hazards to lower-skilled workers. He traces case studies of countries that have managed to produce steady improvement in worker treatment at plants exporting garments, footwear, and other labor-intensive products. The first part of the book examines multilateral proposals designed to place a floor under the treatment of workers around the world, contrasting a WTO-based system to enforce labor standards with "voluntary" arrangements, including corporate codes of conduct, certification organizations, and "sweatshop free" labeling. It explores the pros and cons of adding a "living wage" requirement to the ILO's core labor standards. The second part of the book presents data that significantly broadens our understanding of FDI. By analyzing the evidence from a variety of developing countries—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—Moran demonstrates that most FDI goes to industrial sectors that employ trained workers who are not easily exploited. The flow of FDI to plants that produce electronics, auto parts, industrial equipment, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment, paying production workers two to five times more than what is found in lower-skilled operations, is twenty-five times the flow to garment, textile, and footwea

Making Sweatshops

Making Sweatshops PDF Author: Ellen Israel Rosen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520233379
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
"Making Sweatshops reveals the inexorable movement towards an open trading system, the shifting alignments of actors pushing for or opposing openness, and, most centrally, how trade policy promotes the globalization of apparel production, filling a gap in our understanding of these dynamics."—Richard P. Appelbaum, coauthor of Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry "A detailed examination of the role that trade policy plays in the process of globalization. Rosen provides a meticulous historical analysis of the textile/apparel industry, one of the world's most globalized industries and one of its most hot-button issues."—Stephen Cullenberg, coauthor of Transition and Development in India "Rosen shows how politics have always shaped the trade agenda from beginning to end, and she presents a most compelling case that if trade and the global economy are to foster justice and equality for the people of our world, we will need to rewrite the existing rules of global trade."—Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee "This book delves deep into the industry's trade journals, congressional testimony, newspaper accounts, and economic and political scholarship of the last fifty-five years to tell the story of U.S. trade policy and the decline of labor standards in the apparel industry. This patient and voluminous examination systematically reveals, for the first time, how the U.S. sacrificed its apparel workers on the altar, first of the anti-Communist crusade, and then of free trade ideology."—Robert J.S. Ross, PhD, Professor of Sociology and Director, International Studies Stream, Clark University "Making Sweatshops is, in part, a history of the apparel and textile industries in the U.S. and the world. But it is much more than that. It is also about power and globalization. Rosen explains how the former shapes the latter, and how workers around the world suffer because of it. Activists, policy makers, consumers--anyone interested in understanding why sweatshops exist--should read this book."—Bruce Raynor, President, Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (Unite) "Rosen convincingly demonstrates that it is the transnational corporations rather than the consumers, and certainly rather than the workers, who benefit from trade liberalization, whose rules the lobbyists for these very coporations more or less write for supine politicians. This is a book in the great tradition of solid scholarship allied with deep commitment to the cause of global economic justice."—Leslie Sklair, author of Globalization: Capitalism and its Alternatives

Slaves to Fashion

Slaves to Fashion PDF Author: Robert Ross
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047202566X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
"A brilliant and beautiful book, the mature work of a lifetime, must reading for students of the globalization debate." ---Tom Hayden "Slaves to Fashion is a remarkable achievement, several books in one: a gripping history of sweatshops, explaining their decline, fall, and return; a study of how the media portray them; an analysis of the fortunes of the current anti-sweatshop movement; an anatomy of the global traffic in apparel, in particular the South-South competition that sends wages and working conditions plummeting toward the bottom; and not least, a passionate declaration of faith that humanity can find a way to get its work done without sweatshops. This is engaged sociology at its most stimulating." ---Todd Gitlin ". . . unflinchingly portrays the reemergence of the sweatshop in our dog-eat-dog economy." ---Los Angeles Times Just as Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed uncovered the plight of the working poor in America, Robert J. S. Ross's Slaves to Fashion exposes the dark side of the apparel industry and its exploited workers at home and abroad. It's both a lesson in American business history and a warning about one of the most important issues facing the global capital economy-the reappearance of the sweatshop. Vividly detailing the decline and tragic rebirth of sweatshop conditions in the American apparel industry of the twentieth century, Ross explains the new sweatshops as a product of unregulated global capitalism and associated deregulation, union erosion, and exploitation of undocumented workers. Using historical material and economic and social data, the author shows that after a brief thirty-five years of fair practices, the U.S. apparel business has once again sunk to shameful abuse and exploitation. Refreshingly jargon-free but documented in depth, Slaves to Fashion is the only work to estimate the size of the sweatshop problem and to systematically show its impact on apparel workers' wages. It is also unique in its analysis of the budgets and personnel used in enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act. Anyone who is concerned about this urgent social and economic topic and wants to go beyond the headlines should read this important and timely contribution to the rising debate on low-wage factory labor. Robert J.S. Ross is Professor of Sociology, Clark University. He is an expert in the area of sweatshops and globalization. He is an activist academic who travels and lectures extensively and has published numerous related articles.

Making Sweatshops

Making Sweatshops PDF Author: Ellen Rosen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520928571
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
The only comprehensive historical analysis of the globalization of the U.S. apparel industry, this book focuses on the reemergence of sweatshops in the United States and the growth of new ones abroad. Ellen Israel Rosen, who has spent more than a decade investigating the problems of America's domestic apparel workers, now probes the shifts in trade policy and global economics that have spawned momentous changes in the international apparel and textile trade. Making Sweatshops asks whether the process of globalization can be promoted in ways that blend industrialization and economic development in both poor and rich countries with concerns for social and economic justice—especially for the women who toil in the industry's low-wage sites around the world. Rosen looks closely at the role trade policy has played in globalization in this industry. She traces the history of current policies toward the textile and apparel trade to cold war politics and the reconstruction of the Pacific Rim economies after World War II. Her narrative takes us through the rise of protectionism and the subsequent dismantling of trade protection during the Reagan era to the passage of NAFTA and the continued push for trade accords through the WTO. Going beyond purely economic factors, this valuable study elaborates the full historical and political context in which the globalization of textiles and apparel has taken place. Rosen takes a critical look at the promises of prosperity, both in the U.S. and in developing countries, made by advocates for the global expansion of these industries. She offers evidence to suggest that this process may inevitably create new and more extreme forms of poverty.

Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx

Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx PDF Author: Thierry de Duve
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226922391
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, and Marcel Duchamp form an unlikely quartet, but they each played a singular role in shaping a new avant-garde for the 1960s and beyond. Each of them staged brash, even shocking, events and produced works that challenged the way the mainstream art world operated and thought about itself. Distinguished philosopher Thierry de Duve binds these artists through another connection: the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy. Karl Marx provides the red thread tying together these four beautifully written essays in which de Duve treats each artist as a distinct, characteristic figure in that mapping. He sees in Beuys, who imagined a new economic system where creativity, not money, was the true capital, the incarnation of the last of the proletarians; he carries forward Warhol’s desire to be a machine of mass production and draws the consequences for aesthetic theory; he calls Klein, who staked a claim on pictorial space as if it were a commodity, “The dead dealer”; and he reads Duchamp as the witty financier who holds the secret of artistic exchange value. Throughout, de Duve expresses his view that the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy is a phenomenon that should be seen as central to modernity in art. Even more, de Duve shows that Marx—though perhaps no longer the “Marxist” Marx of yore—can still help us resist the current disenchantment with modernity’s many unmet promises. An intriguing look at these four influential artists, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx is an absorbing investigation into the many intertwined relationships between the economic and artistic realms.

Sweatshop

Sweatshop PDF Author: Laura Hapke
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813542561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Arguing that the sweatshop is as American as apple pie, Laura Hapke surveys over a century and a half of the language, verbal and pictorial, in which the sweatshop has been imagined and its stories told. Not seeking a formal definition of the sort that policymakers are concerned with, nor intending to provide a strict historical chronology, this unique book shows, rather, how the “real” sweatshop has become intertwined with the “invented” sweatshop of our national imagination, and how this mixture of rhetoric and myth has endowed American sweatshops with rich and complex cultural meaning. Hapke uncovers a wide variety of tales and images that writers, artists, social scientists, reformers, and workers themselves have told about “the shop.” Adding an important perspective to historical and economic approaches, Sweatshop draws on sources from antebellum journalism, Progressive era surveys, modern movies, and anti-sweatshop websites. Illustrated chapters detail how the shop has been a facilitator of assimilation, a promoter of upward mobility, the epitome of exploitation, a site of ethnic memory, a venue for political protest, and an expression of twentieth-century managerial narratives. An important contribution to the real and imagined history of garment industry exploitation, this book provides a valuable new context for understanding contemporary sweatshops that now represent the worst expression of an unregulated global economy.

Unmaking the Global Sweatshop

Unmaking the Global Sweatshop PDF Author: Rebecca Prentice
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812249399
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Unmaking the Global Sweatshop gathers the work of leading anthropologists and ethnographers studying the global garment industry's impact on workers' well-being and examines the relationship between the politics of labor and initiatives to protect workers' health and safety.

Students Against Sweatshops

Students Against Sweatshops PDF Author: Liza Featherstone
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859843024
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
This short, punchy book is both a record of a new mass campaign and a tool for the realization of its goals. The students demand one thing: that clothing bearing university logos must be produced under healthy, safe, and fair working conditions.

Beyond Cornerstores, Crime and Sweatshops

Beyond Cornerstores, Crime and Sweatshops PDF Author: Maria Beatrice Medioli
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description