Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor.

Ross, Robert

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor. By Daniel E. Bender (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 288pp.).

There were an estimated 250,000 garment workers in the U.S. in 2000 whose employers failed to pay the minimum wage or did not pay them an overtime premium, and whose shops were physically dangerous or unhealthy. (1) Using the formal definitions of the U.S. Government these sites of "multiple labor law violations" were sweatshops. (2) There were very few garment sweatshops in the 1950s and 1960s. (3)

The period from about 1942 (when Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins abolished homework using enforcement authority granted in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938) to the late 1970s was one of relative decency for North American garment workers. In the late 1940s their earnings were very close to that of the average manufacturing worker. By the late 1990s though, their wages had fallen to little over one-half; sewing machine operators earned about the poverty level income for a family of three. (4) The story of sweatshops in the American garment industry is a story of rise and decline and rise.

The temporary defeat of sweatshops had three pillars of support. The first and most important was the long struggle for trade union unity, employer recognition, and the strength to impose controls on an otherwise cutthroat competitive branch of industry. The ability of workers to accomplish this was substantially increased by their alliance with middle class reformers, symbolized by Ms. Perkins, whose earliest professional work was as an aid in Florence Kelly's Consumer League anti-sweatshop campaign. Perkins herself came to reject "voluntary" codes of conduct such as the sweatshop free labeling campaign of the League, and so stands for the third pillar of working class decency as well: favorable public policy--favorable to union growth and to industrial regulation. Of course the New Deal's Wagner Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act are the most important concrete and symbolic moments for this aspect of the story.

In the struggle for change in a democratic society, contestants often find themselves making arguments that work in that they are effective in gaining allies. The discourse that evolves from a process of trial and error is akin to (but not the same as) a face-to-face negotiation, in that the result may be satisfactory but it may not reflect the "whole" thinking of one of the parties.

In the first decades of the twentieth century infant garment workers' unions had no legal structure of rights, and courts repeatedly rejected laws that regulated workplace hours, wages, and even location. Courts did acknowledge the right of states to regulate hours and conditions in the name of public health. Is it then a surprise that working class leaders and unions took up a language of public health as one way to regulate workplaces in their industry?

Similarly, reformers (including artists) and those who appeal to them are often more readily stirred by appeals to compassion or sympathy than to distributive justice. Sympathy for the sweatshop workers wracked by TB may be easier to mobilize than support for a wage demand or for the right to strike. In contemporary terms this is sometimes called the "victim Olympics". We should not be surprised that this is not an entirely new matter.

Daniel Bender wants to contend with such common sense reasoning. One part of Bender's monograph successfully mines the rich store of records of the Joint Board of Sanitary Control (JBSC). The JBSC was created as part of the settlement of the strike waves of 1909-1913 that began the process of taming the worst of sweatshop conditions in the New York garment industry. It represents, for Bender, the cross-class alliance between workers and their union on one hand, and the professionals and reformers (in the case of the JBSC, public health professionals) on the other. He notes, with some repetition but with superb illustration of art, literature and photographs, that workers and professionals associated the sweatshop and the hyperexploitation of labor upon which it rested, with occupational diseases and injuries--the weak bodies of the title. Thus, the fight against sweatshops is defined in this context as a struggle for physical improvement of workplaces. Bender thinks this meliorist agenda supplanted, as he puts it, transformation of the wage relations of the industry. He implies repeatedly that the disease (especially TB) and other physical dangers of the old sweatshops were exaggerated. Perhaps: but the memory of the "tragedy" of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire continues to be among the greatest of contemporary cultural resources for combating abusive workplace conditions.

Another major theme of Bender's investigation is the gender structure of garment production, of garment union leadership, and the idealized male-led family that union language sought to protect. He finds that the fight against sweatshops was, importantly to the men in the trades, a struggle to achieve a family wage for male "breadwinners." This led to slow recognition of women's rights to decent wages and conditions, and to a relative exclusion of women from significant leadership roles in the union. Because Jewish women tended to leave the garment shops upon marriage, the Jewish men who dominated the union tended to see them as less experienced unionists and their interests as less critical to family survival than their own. To his credit Bender shows that these views were shared by many women as well. There is a dualism in his presentation: between an (arguably) anachronistic imposition of today's vision of the two earner household on the past and a thorough and careful reading of memoirs and documents.

Bender seems implicitly to prefer a class conscious language of confrontation (though its compatibility with his feminist sympathies is weakened by his story of the faction-fights of the Twenties). His discussion of gender and class language is fascinating, especially with the rise of the Communist majority in New York City locals. The classic episode of confrontational go-it-alone militance in New York garment history is the largely failed Communist-led strike of 1926. Bender's principal observation about this is that faction fights engendered even more masculinized leadership and imagery than earlier.

One problem with Bender's early discussion of alliance with professionals is that the only two periods of melioration of sweatshop conditions in the US over the last one hundred years have occurred under conditions about which he seems ambivalent: alliance with middle class campaigners and political reformers--in 1915-1925 and 1940 (or 1938) through the late 1970s.

Despite a host of fascinating finds and careful archival work, Bender has fallen in love with his themes. His commitment to a confused theory of gender and class, and no theory at all of political change, has walled his work from potential contributions from political economy and sociology and the study of politics. For example, as early as 1961 Neil Smelser surprised students of working class and industrial history with research that showed that the timing of cotton mill workers' protests was more closely in accord with disruptions to family structures and authority than with regard to wages. (5) The last chapter, a reflection on the antisweatshop movement involving middle class consumers of the late 1990s, leaves the reader with rhetorical questions but little understanding of how to win the struggle against the rise of the new sweatshops.

The globalization of manufacturing capital; the political and economic defeat of unions (now only 6% of apparel workers); the decline of labor law enforcement; and the rise of powerful retail chains--none of these is analyzed in Bender's brief foray into the present. Because this work finishes its formal research in the early Thirties, the big success of the 20th Century is not in full view and so the book does not give a sense of the decline and then rise of late 20th century labor abuse in the apparel business. It thus makes a specialized contribution.

Benders' view is a useful look at the emergence of the new public health and industry relationship in the first quarter of a century; it shows the way working class and union discourse about the workplace and family shaped the public rhetoric and private experience of women and men in the apparel industry. Given the generality of harm that global capitalism has caused for unions and workers in labor intensive industries, it is doubtful that the problematic aspects of these discourses are big contributors to the rise of the new sweatshops.

ENDNOTES

1. Robert J.S. Ross, Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and abuse in the new sweatshops (Ann Arbor, 2004.)

2. U.S. GAO (General Accounting Office), "Sweatshops" in the U.S.: opinions on their extent and possible enforcement options: briefing report to the Honorable Charles E. Schumer, House of Representatives" (Washington, D.C., 1988.)

3. Ross, op. cit.

4. Ibid.

5. Neil Smelser, Social change in the Industrial Revolution. (Chicago, 1959; reprint, Brookfield, VT, 1994.)

Robert Ross

Clark University