This book explores how sweatshops provide the best opportunity to workers and the role they play in the process of development.

As the main artery of international commerce, merchant shipping was the world's first globalized industry, often serving as a vanguard for issues touching on labor recruiting, the employment relationship, and regulatory enforcement that crossed national borders. In Sweatshops at Sea, historian Leon Fink examines the evolution of laws and labor relations governing ordinary seamen over the past two centuries. The merchant marine offers an ideal setting for examining the changing regulatory regimes applied to workers by the United States, Great Britain, and, ultimately, an organized world community. Fink explores both how political and economic ends are reflected in maritime labor regulations and how agents of reform--including governments, trade unions, and global standard-setting authorities--grappled with the problems of applying land-based, national principles and regulations of labor discipline and management to the sea-going labor force. With the rise of powerful nation-states in a global marketplace in the nineteenth century, recruitment and regulation of a mercantile labor force emerged as a high priority and as a vexing problem for Western powers. The history of exploitation, reform, and the evolving international governance of sea labor offers a compelling precedent in an age of more universal globalization of production and services.

In this up-close and personal look at the heroines who make family, community, and society tick, Miriam Ching Yoon Louie showcases immigrant women workers speaking out for themselves, in their own words. While public outrage over sweatshops builds in intensity, this book shows us who these workers really are and how they are leading campaigns to fight for their rights. In-depth, accessible analyses of the immigration, labor, and trade policies, which together have forced these women into the most dangerous, poorly paid jobs, dovetail with vivid portraits of the women themselves. Louie, a longtime writer/activist and well-known figure in feminist, immigrant, and labor circles, is uniquely poised to make her case: that the labor of immigrant women worker-activists not only sustains families and communities, but the vibrant social activism that undergirds democracy itself. With chapters on successful campaigns against Levi-Strauss, Donna Karan, and restaurants in Los Angeles; Koreatown, among others. Miriam Ching Yoon Louie is a longtime writer/activist in campaigns to organize women of color. She is national campaign media director of Fuerza Unida, a board member of the Women of Color Resource Center, and former media director of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates. Her essays and articles on immigrant women and labor issues have been widely anthologized, including in the 1997 collection Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire (South End Press) and she speaks at public events internationally. She is the co-author, with Linda Burnham, of Women's Education in the Global Economy (Women of Color Resource Center, 2000).

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.

Sweatshop labour is characterized by low wages, long hours, and systematic health and safety hazards. Most of the workers in the sweatshops of the garment industry are women, many of them migrant women. This book develops an intersectional feminist critique of the working conditions in sweatshops by analysing the role of gender, race, and migration status in bringing about and justifying the exploitation of workers on factory floors. Based on this analysis, the book argues that sweatshop workers are structurally vulnerable to exploitation in virtue of their position as gendered, racialized, and migrant workers within global supply chains. While this exploitation benefits powerful actors along global supply chains, it also creates spaces of resistance and structural transformation.

Although watchdog agencies monitor workplaces and press corporations to raise labor standards, these agencies are not enough; only coordinated action by consumers, monitors, unions, and nongovernmental organizations will threaten profits and force those who own corporations to care about the lives of those who work for them. Activists, scholars, and officials of the International Labor Organization and the World Bank respond to this provocative and hopeful proposal."--BOOK JACKET.

"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