It’s 2018, so I thought we retired the word sweatshop, which google defines as a factory or workshop, especially in the clothing industry, where manual workers are employed at very low wages for long hours and under poor conditions. Remember when the country shamed the then star of Regis and Kathi Lee for her self-named clothing line that was found out for using sweatshops for manufacturing her line?
1996
The public up-roared in disgust for the business choices of the TV host, and stopped shopping at Walmart where the clothing was sold. And all was well with the world. Except that wasn’t the case, instead of ceasing sweatshop practices, we have continued
The Key to global production is the subcontracting system:
*Yes everyone involved in this pyramid is in mid-dance*
As you can see, if you are able to ready my chicken scratch, to avoid having to look directly responsible for working conditions, Major brands like Nike, and Calvin Klein subcontract the brokerage of their manufacturing. Those guys are in the top of the pyramid, then next level are those companies that the major retailers and brands have hired to find the supplier for that particular contract. The final level of the pyramid is that of the massive numbers of third world workers who are making the product and are mostly women.
2013
In Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, the author tells of 1,129 Bangladeshis that die due to poor building construction and conditions. Most of those who died were women. “The collapse was the deadliest disaster in the history of the garment industry, a global industry long plagued by disasters (Enloe, p.250). Who is to blame? “In today’s globally competitive garment industry, the men who own the factories producing jeans, bathing suits, lingerie, and basketball uniforms under contract for European, or North American brand-name companies cannot risk falling behind in their production deadlines. Those deadlines are set by:
Why are we still buying brands that operate in this manner? “Putting geographic and political distance between their own boardrooms and the factory floors where low-waged women sewed their products has been one of the core globalizing business strategies of current- era companies..” (Enloe, p 255).
Play on Words
A lot of the material that I researched for this topic noted the same idea of naturalizing women’s work in order to cheapen it. Enloe explains to her readers that labor has to be “made” cheap (p 263). Society has been able to use words like “natural” or “inherent” when describing roles like household maintenance, and childcare to devalue these jobs within a household, thus making jobs like nannying or house-cleaning not as well paying as they should be. Companies have done the same thing in terms of factory jobs, “Male entrepreneurs in industries deliberately feminized labor in order to make it profitable and internationally competitive (Enloe, pg 264). Enloe shares the example of the sewing machine, and how the context of the sewing machine was changed for women workers, and that they were encouraged to see it as a symbol of liberation. While the male entrepreneurs were buying all of these sewing machines in bulk to be offered to anyone who was willing to use it. As a woman in this situation, you are being sold on the dream of independence, or to be able to provide for your family, but for the entrepreneur, you’re just a number.
I think it’s really important that I revisit this topic frequently. It’s easy to get lost in the internal struggles of the US, and forget about how my everyday amazon purchases are perpetuating this terrible system of corporate greed and exploitation under the guise of a new life.
Sources:
Enloe, Cynthia H., 1938- author. Bananas, Beaches and Bases : Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley, California :University of California Press, 2014. Kindle.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. “Women’s History in the New Millennium: Reframing the History of Women’s Wage Labor: Challenges of a Global Perspective.” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 15, no. 4, 2004, pp. 186.
Strom, S. (2018). A Sweetheart Becomes Suspect;Looking Behind Those Kathie Lee Labels. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/27/business/a-sweetheart-becomes-suspect-looking-behind-those-kathie-lee-labels.html?ref=oembed [Accessed 20 Aug. 2018].
UM-D Women's & Gender Studies
UM-D Gender & Globalization 
I totally forgot about the Kathy Lee sweatshop incidents. That just goes to show that as time passes, so does the memory of the consumer. Let’s be honest, that’s what most companies will do. They’ll simply slap a band-aid on an otherwise unsightly gash by implementing some mediocre rule change or PR stunt that serves as a guise for real change. Then we (the consumer) will fall into the trap and let the truth fall by the wayside as we continue to support the unethical treatment of the people actually manufacturing the clothing lines. However, the mistreatment and low wages aren’t confined to overseas factories.
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) inspected 77 garment manufacturing plants in Los Angeles from April through July of 2016. They discovered that workers were paid as little as $4 and earned an average of wage $7 an hour for 10-hour days spent sewing clothes for Forever 21, Ross Dress for Less and TJ Maxx. One worker in West Covina made as little as $3.42 per hour during three weeks of sewing TJ Maxx clothing. In all, the DOL found violations in 85% of the factories it visited and ordered $1.3 million in back wages, lost overtime and damages be paid out (Kitroeff & Kim, 2017). While the majority of the garment industry maltreatments do occur in foreign factories, we must remain cognizant of the fact that it doesn’t always occur across an ocean.
Source:
Kitroeff, N., & Kim, V. (2017, August 31). Behind a $13 shirt, a $6-an-hour worker. The Los Angeles Times.
These companies would rather see the people of the third world countries working in terrible conditions for them rather than losing a bit more money to improve their conditions and pay them more. If they had their companies in one of the first world countries like the United States, it would have been a total different story with much more expenses towards the working conditions. This is why most of the companies place their factories in third world countries. For example in the Women’s Labor is Never Cheap chapter by Enloe she mentioned the Levis company moving all of their factories to third world countries like Philippines, Indonesia, China, and etc. The people in this country are very desperate for a job. they will take anything. This sort of also related the migrant workers doing care work. These people (mostly women) come from very poor countries that jobs like this will still allow them to continue to live in poverty which is sad.
I was in high school when that tragedy occurred and I remember being so shaken up by it. At the time, I was beginning to learn more about the unethical labor practices that western companies upheld in the global south, but I had yet to see an example of the tradgedies that could occur due to such practices. Hearing of the factory tradgedy (is sweatshop not a politically correct term?) made me feel more pressured to stop buying new clothes from unethical companies, even if unethical labor is not entirely possible under late capitalism. I shifted many of my buying habits so that I only bought clothes second hamd or partook in clothing swaps, which limited the amount of consumption that I was responsible for and could connect people’s lost lives and underpaid labor to. It is important for us to remember the real consequences of theoretical debates surrounding inhumane labor practices.
I really enjoyed reading your blog post. The factories mention by Enloe that burned down containing mainly women was the saddest thing to read. The conditions that these workers were put through was sickening. It isn’t fair to treat these hard-working people, often times women, in such hazardous conditions. you are absolutely right about revisiting these types of harsh labors that many people in sweatshops often work in. Big brand named companies are a complete sellout because of how poorly they treat their workers. The demand things o be due by certain deadlines as if these workers are machines and not human beings. The whole point for these big brand companies is to produce a mass number of products, while at the same time neglecting the hard working people. it is all about profit for them in the end and sweatshops are the most awful things to yet exist within our society.