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Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry by Jill Esbenshade. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004, 272 pp., $69.50 hardcover, $22.95 paper.
Guess? denied and Kathie Lee cried. The secretary of Labor jawboned, while students protested. Domestic and international human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) investigated. The anti-sweatshop movement grew from public disgust with the child labor, starvation wages, sexual harassment, and authoritarian repression that lay behind Nike labels and Wal-Mart bargains. It developed from a new awareness of globalization, in which some women from Asia and the Americas had migrated to Los Angeles and other U.S. cities to engage in work that other women did in their countries of origin. But as El Salvadoran trade unionist Marcela Munoz explains, "Someone outside cannot know what it is like to be at a machine ten hours a day, or standing ironing, to be out of your house for fifteen hours. And that person cannot defend our rights" (206). At the end of the twentieth century, the sweatshop became the object of political controversy with the transformation of apparel production under global supply chains, product branding, and government deregulation. Particularly important was the dominance of big retailers who exerted control over manufacturing without legal liability. Monitoring Sweatshops critically assesses the...