Title: No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers
Abstract: This study tells the story of the chasm between the glamour of the catwalk and the squalor of the sweatshop. Few consumers are aware that the T-shirt or the running shoes they are wearing have been produced by children as young as 13 years old, working 14-hour days for 30 cents an hour. A label claiming that the item was manufactured in the USA or Europe is no reassurance that this is actually the case. It could have been sewn in Haiti or Indonesia - or in a domestic sweatshop where conditions rival those in the Third World. label says nothing of how the worker who made it was treated. book reveals: how Nike's celebrity spokesman Michael Jordan earned more for endorsing Nike running shoes than the company's 200,000-strong Asian workforce get between them in a year; How Disney boss Michael Eisner's annual pay and stock options, worth $200 million, are partly paid for out of profits from the sale of Pocahontas and Hunchback of Notre Dame T-shirt made by Haitian teenagers working for less than $10 per week and force-fed contraceptive pills; how campaigning by the New York-based National Labor Committee, the American workers' union UNITE and US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has forced embarassing climb-downs by companies, such as GAP and Wal Mart, caught using sweated labour. Contributors include Jo-Ann Mort and Alan Howard (UNITE); Julie Su, Charlie Kernaghan and the National Labor Committee (edited by Kitty Krupat); Bud Konheim (interviewed by Sally Singer); Mike Piore; John Cavanagh; MacKenzie Wark; Angela McRobbie; Robin Givhan; and Paul Smith. Andrew Ross is the author of The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life and Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits.
Publication Year: 1997
Publication Date: 1997-09-17
Language: en
Type: book
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Cited By Count: 337
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