Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry

Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry, by Jill Esbenshade. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004. 288 pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 1592132561.

This is an easy book to review. In a couple hundred tightly-written pages, Esbenshade brilliantly explains the emerging system of labor relations in the highly-globalized apparel industry, analyzes the weakness of the industry's preferred approach, and offers an alternative way to combat sweatshop production.

Monitoring Sweatshops takes on a subject of enormous and timely importance-holding firms accountable for their labor practices at a time when they are increasingly outsourcing their production to independently-owned factories around the globe. Although the book focuses on the global apparel industry, its findings are relevant to a wide range of consumer goods industries in buyer-driven commodity chains-those industries in which retailers and branded labels design and market their products, leaving the unpleasant job of actually making those products to others.

While apparel firms once acted as if outsourcing production absolved them of any moral responsibility for labor conditions in their contract factories, growing consumer awareness-fueled by the student anti-sweatshop movement-has forced many to take a closer look at the conditions under which their labels are produced. (Whatever...