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

By Andrew Ross

Book Overview

Are you aware that the T-shirt or running shoes you're wearing may have been produced by a 13-year-old children working 14-hour days for 30 cents an hour? The clothing sweatshop, as a recent string of media exposés has revealed, is back in business. Don't be fooled by a label which says the item was made in the USA or Europe. It could have been sewed on in Haiti or Indonesia--or in a domestic workshop, where conditions rival those in the third world. The label might tell you how to treat the garment but it says nothing about how the worker who made it was treated. To find out about that you need to read this book. No Sweat will show you: How Michael Jordan earned more for endorsing Nike running shoes than the company's 30,000 Indonesian workers get between them in a year. How Disney CEO Michael Eisner's annual pay and stock options, worth $200 million, are paid for out of profits from the sale of Pocahontas and Hunchback of Notre Dame T-shirts made by Haitian teenagers working for less than $10 per week and force-fed contraceptive pills. How companies like the Gap and Wal-Mart (producer of the Kathie Lee Gifford line) have been forced into embarrassing concessions after successful campaigning by the New York-based National Labor Committee, the American garment workers union UNITE and the European-based Clean Clothes Campaign. How you can join the growing global campaign of consumer groups, human rights activists, and international labor organizations to close down sweatshops and guarantee basic rights for those who cut and sew our clothes. In hard-hitting words and pictures, No Sweat surveys the chasm between the glamor of the catwalk and the squalor of the sweatshop. Don't go shopping without it!

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1859841724
• ISBN13: 9781859841723
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Powerful remonstration

No one LIKES sweatshops...we know they're bad, & all hiss convincingly when the latest human rights violation in the garment industry is read off on the evening news. We shake our heads & swear we'll boycott, and we DO...until the story fades from the top of the hour & the remembrance of those that suffered is forgotten. Because in truth, we'd all just as soon pretend that all our garments are made by shining, happy people sitting in front of gently humming sewing machines, joyously making a living wage which allows for a movie every Friday night so that we can go on buying our clothes for cheap. NO SWEAT takes that gentle complacency, that warm cocoon of apathy & shatters it, laying the garment industry bare for all to see in every last bit of its infamy. Constructed out of the voices of a few, NO SWEAT speaks for millions. Including testimony from sweatshop workers themselves, along with activists, trade union organizers, journalists, academics & industry insiders, NO SWEAT covers the entire spectrum of the labor movement as it stands today, & gives us a not entirely promising glimpse into a future beset by our own apathy. Offering harrowing firsthand accounts from workers & ground level testimony from activists, NO SWEAT paints a very vivid picture of the immense dichotomy of the industry, which begins in the squalor of the sweatshop, but emerges on the catwalks. Some of the testimony seems hardly believable in this day and age, but the accounts are real & true, a sad testament to how far the movement has yet to go. Such is terribly affective, a powerful remonstration of our own apathy. Unfortunately, though the book does not attempt to appear objective, it does make a token effort to allow the other side a forum. While a great idea, ultimately, NO SWEAT doesn't go far enough in this vein, lending the preponderance of its pages to the labor movement, & only a few, always negative pages to industry insiders. This weakens the integrity of the piece as a whole. If the editors of NO SWEAT were not prepared to go all the way, then they should have never have made even the slightest pretension towards giving the other side a say. Such is only a small cavil however, among a great many strengths. NO SWEAT should occupy a place of prominence in every library.