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Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry, by Ellen Israel Rosen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 336 pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-520-23336-0. $21.95 paper. ISBN: 0-520-23337-9.
ALESSANDRO BONANNO
Sam Houston State University
soc_aab@shsu. edu
In this interesting and well-written book, Ellen Israel Rosen analyzes the globalization of the U.S. apparel industry. She argues that globalization fostered the redevelopment of sweatshops in this sector of the American economy. While poor labor conditions and overt labor exploitation characterized this industry for many decades, the U.S. postwar management-labor accord and the concomitant economic expansion enabled apparel workers, primarily women, to enjoy relatively good wages and working conditions in the 1950s and 1960s. More aggressive trade liberalization policies adopted in the 1980s, and the subsequent growth of global sourcing, reversed this trend and recreated sweatshop conditions in contemporary production units in the United States, as well as in other parts of the globe.
Rosen begins her analysis with a probing critique of the neoclassical economic paradigm as applied to the analysis of trade in textile and apparel. She argues that the neoliberal economic paradigm is based on erroneous assumptions, as it fails to take into account the social, institutional, and gender contexts that characterized the development of the industry. Neoliberal economists, she continues, also violate assumptions about the functioning of the...