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GARMENT SWEATSHOPS ARE MUCH IN THE NEWS IN RECENT YEARS. FROM NEW YORK TO Los Angeles, headlines announce the return of a social problem that most Americans had assumed to be long dead. Indeed, today's headlines bear a marked resemblance to those of the turn of the last century, when sweatshops were also very much in the public consciousness. Contemporary journalists are aware of this and often draw explicit parallels between late twentieth century sweatshops and those of one hundred years ago. 1 Of course, the two periods differ in many ways. In an industry made up largely of immigrants, the specific ethnic groups have changed. In an era of globalization, the problem has become an international one, making it more difficult for government agencies or trade unions to address. Also, the venues have changed--sweatshops are no longer limited to the stereotypical tenements described by Jacob Riis in 1890.
Nevertheless, the journalists are not wrong to compare the two time periods. They really are strikingly similar. Indeed, as this article will show (with special reference to New York City), the sweatshop problem has been deeply rooted in the structure of the garment industry since its earliest days.
WHAT IS A SWEATSHOP?
THE WORD "SWEATSHOP" CONJURES UP A HOST of images. First of all, it brings to mind a hot, stuffy room where hapless workers literally sweat as they toil, but the term implies much more than that. Today, many observers define "sweatshops" as those factories that regularly violate a variety of labor laws. 2 Despite its seeming specificity, however, this sort of technical definition fails to capture the full meaning of the term. For one thing, the concept of the sweatshop arose precisely at a time when there was little, if any, regulation of working conditions. For over a century now, people have associated the word with a number of factors, most commonly including:
poor working conditions
low wages
long hours
arbitrary power of the boss over the workers.
Since these qualities may exist in any number of industries, the sweatshop has become a metaphor for all sorts of abuses of the industrial system.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people connected the sweatshop with at least three additional factors. Then as...