Flesh & Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy provides over 160 pages of information focusing on the destruction of a
sweatshop in 1911, and is a fine pick for grades 4-6 studying American history and social issues.
The report focuses on the Junxingye
sweatshop factory in southern China, which employs mostly young women paid 26.5 cents per hour--less than half of China's legal minimum wage.
THIS LOOKS a lot like a Godfrey Kneller portrait of William III painted in the 17th century, but it's actually a copy of Kneller painted the other day in a
sweatshop in Dafen, China.
NO COLLEGE PRESIDENT IN HIS right mind would want apparel bearing his school's logo made in a
sweatshop. But licensing agreements, long-held partnerships, and factors specific to the retail business make putting an end to such circumstances complicated.
Robert Ross's Slaves to Fashion tells the story of the transformation from an America that had for all practical purposes banished the
sweatshop to history books to one where hundreds of thousands labor under
sweatshop conditions both abroad and at home.
I have nicknamed my son's college apartment, the site of a former candy factory, "the
sweatshop." Laura Hapke would understand.
Joey Taggart *, 10 workers at a Milo Androvich *, 12 Pennsylvania Foreman coal mine Roselie Randazzo, worker at a New York City
sweatshop Girl, Roselie's co-worker Woman,
sweatshop supervisor Clerk, at a hospital Irvine Luther Lenroot, U.S.
Veteran
sweatshop activist Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee called the disclosure "a significant step that will blow away the myth that companies can't release their factory names because it's proprietary information.
By Richard Appelbaum and Peter Dreier At Columbia University in September, twenty-four students marched to president Lee Bollinger's office, chanted "Hey, hey, Prez Bo,
sweatshop labor's got to go," and left a cupcake as a gift.
Despite an overabundance of studies, dating back to the mid-19th century, the
sweatshop, Hapke argues, is best understood as "an idea," a cultural construction consisting as much of the narratives and visual iconography surrounding the tragedies of sweated labor--miserable, sometimes deadly, working conditions; piecework and low wages; exploitation of young, typically female, immigrants--as the actual experiences and statistics amassed by unions, progressives, workers and policy makers to ameliorate or even eliminate them.
As part of a social justice project, students at Massachusetts' Brookline High recently set up a mock textile
sweatshop on the school's second floor complete with old sewing machines, the Boston Globe reports.
For example, American Apparel--which employs more than 1,000 workers in its LA T-shirt factory--aggressively promotes itself as a socially responsible "
sweatshop free" employer.
sweatshop - factory where workers do piecework for poor pay and are prevented from forming unions; common in the clothing industry