Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea

by Laura Hapke

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813534671
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	07/29/2004
Edition description:	None ed.
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)
Lexile:	1600L (what's this?)

About the Author

LAURA HAPKE has taught working-class studies and labor literature at Pace University, Queens College, and Hunter College. Recipient of two Choice Outstanding Academic Book awards, her most recent book is Labor's Text: The Worker in American Fiction.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea by Laura Hapke

Copyright information: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/press_copyright_and_disclaimer/default.html
"The aims of the imagination are not the aims of history." -Cynthia Ozick, quoted in Sarah Boxer, "Giving Memory Its Due in an Age of License," New York Times (1998)
The sweatshop is as American as apple pie. But what has it meant to the American imagination? Scholars, of course, have long told the story of sweated labor. Of late, excellent work by Andrew Ross, Edna Bonacich and Richard Applebaum, and others has clarified our understanding of the sweatshop from its antebellum origins to the era of cyberspace.1 My concern here, though, is the language, verbal and pictorial, in which the sweatshop is imagined and its stories told. A century and a half of writings on the shop, punctuated by graphic art, does more than narrate or define. Even in the writings of authors who seek "scientific" definitions, language itself undermines, refashions, challenges, and sometimes contradicts the official goals of policy makers, advocates, and workers themselves. For this multitude of storytellers, the invented is submerged in the real sweatshop. I use the word "story" here in the broadest sense. It is an imaginative construction, yes, but one that relies on the rhetoric, helps organize the knowledge, and is the repository of its culture's (or subculture's) beliefs and myths, assumptions, and prejudices.
Though such imaginings inevitably build on the troubling actuality, finding this real sweatshop is a difficult enterprise. The sweatshop has taken many different forms over the century and ahalf it has existed in the United States, yet it remains an exploitative urban workplace associated with the garment trades and still synonymous with the lowest and most degrading kind of American employment. There is no agreement on how many American sweatshops there are, where in this country they are actually located, how extensive they are, or what exactly constitutes one. The year 2000 Department of Labor (DOL) definition is correspondingly vague: "a place of employment that violate[s] two or more federal or state labor laws governing minimum wage and overtime, child labor, industrial homework occupational safety and health, workers' compensation or industry registration." Nongovernmental reform groups, though working loosely with that definition, broaden it further to include other working conditions that would not constitute DOL violations (such as working for abusive supervisors and not being able to take unpaid sick leave or vacation).2 Unions themselves tacitly widen the scope outside the garment trades: the new UNITE, the onetime International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) antisweatshop watchdog of garment-trades socialism, not only is now a "Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees" but also has satellite locals well outside of those trades. And a recent privately funded study that surveys Chicago's garment industry, still a principal sweatshop venue, showed that it was actually quite small compared to bicoastal ones, and argued that the new definition of sweatshop must be expanded to restaurants, domestic services, and light industry.3
Andrew Ross, whose groundbreaking anthology No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers limits itself to the clothing trades, writes that there is a "tendency to see sweatshops, however defined, as an especially abhorrent species of labor, and therefore in a moral class of their own. . . . People are more inclined to accept or tolerate the existence of labor conditions that cover the legal standards, but only barely. Sweatshops are seen to be morally and politically apart from the lawful low-wage sector, which is condoned as a result."4 This moral and political distinction reinforces the perception of the sweatshop as a general description of exploitative labor conditions rather than as a "subpar outfit, as defined by existing laws in whatever country the owner chooses to operate."5
However broadly it is defined-for it comes in all shapes and sizes- the sweatshop retains its late-nineteenth-century association with the seamstress and the tailor. Candy wrapping, cigarmaking, and assembling artificial flowers were among a host of occupations inevitably bundled into sweated work, but the always pejorative label "sweatshop" remained synonymous with the Singer sewing machine, the hard-driving clothing- floor subcontractor, the ingenuous immigrant good with the needle, the piecework system. In fact, as Andrew Ross's subtitle ("Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers") indicates, the garment industry is a useful prism through which we can look at both the sweatshops of the past and the reemerging ones of today staffed by the newest waves of legal and illegal immigrants of the late 1960s and early 1970s from China, Korea, Southeast Asia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Central and South America.6 These workers join those earlier arrivals whose jobs were created by the growth of U.S.-based international garment production. As such, these new immigrants form the basis for a discussion of the changing nature of the workplace and of the American working class itself.
Any analysis of the impact of today's sweatshops, however, is incomplete without a look at Americans' historical response to the sweatshop. Have we viewed it as a social wrong? As a symbol? As an embarrassing reminder of immigrants? As a situation that ethnics, especially today's illegal immigrants, "deserve"?
Antonio Gramsci defined ideology as "a distorted vision of what is in fact the historical truth of a particular situation."7 Nowhere have ideological battles about the shop and the events that affected them been more powerful than in New York City. New York is, of course, central to the American imagination of manual work in many crucial ways. The city was, among other things, a locus of middle-class reform campaigns against the "immoral" working poor, the "unwashed" tenement ethnic, and the propriety of women's paid work outside the home. Workers themselves saw the city as a mecca for self-transformation, especially economic, or alternatively as a place whose radical political ferment could transform and be transformed by the lived experience of class. As a city in which all of these notions of class and gender mobility and stratification continue to be played out, New York provided the garment trade with a quintessential ideological battleground in its formative years. By the end of the nineteenth century, when the sweatshop was so pervasive as to be institutionalized, sweated labor venues in New York, from apartment size to factory loft, numbered in the thousands. Most were clandestine, closed to knowledge and inspection. Organizers with United Hebrew Trades (UHT) tried to persuade sweatshop workers not to choose competitive individualism over working-class solidarity. They were faced, however, with a recurrent problem in clothing trades militancy: the early strikes and walkouts were short-lived victories over shop conditions more than drives for social justice. Nevertheless, with the founding of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union in 1900 and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) in 1914, sweatshop insurgency began to gain members and bargaining power in the larger struggle for industrial democracy.8
Chicago and Rochester were also prominent sweatshop cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but New York City was by default the premier sweatshop venue because it not only lacked massproduction facilities but also had none of the heavily male industrial unions that carried on interethnic battles in the cities to the west. Beth Wenger makes the point that one garment-work hub, New York's Lower East Side, was never "the Old World transplanted." Instead, in its heyday, "the East Side reflected the social, economic, and cultural life of Jews adapting to the American environment, not recreating the European world."9 Many of New York City's sweated laborers-East European, Mediterranean, Asian-represented to the dominant culture the discourses of otherness that the vested interests of the Gilded Age and Progressive era had sought to transform into an "American" culture.10 In the Depression era, New York's centrality to garment trade and sweatshop labor remained, despite limited New Deal collective bargaining gains. As late as 1948, the ILGWU cited peak membership, much of it in New York City. The decades of postwar affluence and waning union clout saw relocations of the trade to right-to-work states and, as the 1960s began, increased manufacturing in Third World countries well removed from U.S. minimum wage and unionism alike.
In the nation itself, waves of Third World immigrants in the 1980s shored up old sweatshops and created new ones. By the 1980s, California was fast becoming the largest garment manufacturing center and sweated labor hub in the United States.11 Poorly organized, the apparel factories, often staffed with undocumented Latina and Asian immigrants (mostly women), easily fell beneath already poorly enforced National Labor Relations Board/Department of Labor standards for pay and working conditions. Periodic raids of sweatshops on both coasts continued to scandalize and then be forgotten by the American public. By the late 1990s, Los Angeles had eclipsed New York City as a garment manufacturing center, but familiar terms such as "Chinatown sweatshop" continued to connote New York's Asian labor site. When the immensely popular television show Law and Order addressed the sweatshop as another indigenous urban problem, the subcontractors who even murdered in the name of sweatshop profits were fused in the show's typically hard-boiled fashion with the avarice of New York lawbreakers.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vii
	Abbreviations	ix
1	Narrating the Shop	1
Part I	The Sweatshop Surveyed
2	A Shop Is Not a Home: Dirt, Ethnicity, and the Sweatshop	17
3	Surviving Sites: Sweatshops in the Progressive Era and Beyond	40
Part II	Sweatshop Aesthetics
4	Newsreel of Memory: The WPA Sweatshop in the Great Depression	69
5	The Sweatshop Returns: Postindustrial Art	88
Part III	Spinning the Shop
6	Spinning the New Shop: El Monte and the Smithsonian Furor	111
7	Nike's Sweatshop Quandary and the Industrial Sublime	129
8	Watching Out for the Shop	144
	Notes	157
	Selected Bibliography	181
	Index	191

Editorial Reviews

Sweatshop is a wholly unique, compelling, and marvelous survey of one hundred and fifty years in the narration of sweatshop experiences in prose and graphic art. Laura Hapke once again astonishes the reader with her salutary blend of historically-based interdisciplinary scholarship and wide-ranging references that treat ideology, gender, and ethnicity with appropriate clarity and sophistication.

Professor of English and American culture, University of Michigan; author of Exi - Alan Wald

A scholar of the sweatshop, Laura Hapke expands the boundaries of cultural studies while never losing sight of the worker behind the machine.

author of Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work - Janet Zandy

Adding a critical new perspective to existing political, social, and economic histories, Laura Hapke has crafted a book on the sweatshops of our imagination. Hers is an important project precisely because this particular space for the production of goods carries extensive symbolic and political weight.

University of California, Santa Barbara - Eileen Boris

"Anyone interested in discovering why the sweatshop is still with us and why it still holds an important place in our nation's discourse will do well to read this book."

Coeditor of Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Global and Historical Perspective - Richard A. Greenwald

"Anyone interested in discovering why the sweatshop is still with us and why it still holds an important place in our nation's discourse will do well to read this book."

From the Publisher