Sweatshops

Conceptual Overview

The sweatshop was never outside the capitalist system of production but integral to it. During the rise of the factory system of production, the sweatshop was one nodal point in the production chain, extending down from retailers at the top, manufacturers, contractors, and home production. Even with mechanization, labor was the most important cost in the manufacture of clothing because machine labor could not replace human labor in clothing assembly operations, as Seidman noted in 1942. Contracting out work allowed manufacturers flexibility in meeting production targets for buyers without having to invest unnecessarily in plant and equipment, a particularly important consideration given the seasonality of the industry. Manufacturers could focus on the higher value-added design, cutting, and mark-up operations in-house, while contracting out some of the most labor intensive assembly operations. Savings in the labor cost of clothing assembly provided manufacturers with competitive advantage in seeking orders from buyers for retail organizations. Contracting out work also allowed manufacturers to bypass or undermine union organization and collective agreements, observed Scott and Cassidy in 1935.

Contracting was thus an integral structural component of the clothing industry from the beginning, and this industry was at the forefront of outsourcing long before it became fashionable in other industries and in management discourse. Just as retailers could drive down costs by fomenting competition between manufacturers, contractors were in competition with one another to win work from the manufacturers. The entire production chain operated on the basis of lowering the cost of labor, and this was particularly so for the contractors. Thus, many manufacturing establishments and especially contract factories operated in sweatshop conditions, characterized by low wages, piece-work, long hours, and unsanitary, unhealthy working conditions. The clothing industry, and the sweatshop, was also characterized by a social division of labor relying on immigrant and women workers, by weak and uneven union representation, and by weak regulation of factories and of working conditions. Monitoring and enforcement of laws was difficult given the complexity of the production chain and easily evaded by the sweatshop form of organization.

The very conditions that generated and kept sweatshop production viable also gave rise in North America in the first three decades of the 20th century to some of the largest labor and union mobilizations, as well as cross-class coalitions of labor, immigrant, women's and welfare organizations, and investigative journalists. The antisweatshop campaigns, union mobilization, and organizational strikes of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s eventually led to a combination of relatively effective union representation, collective [Page 1496]agreements, in some places with extensions of the conditions of collective agreements to nonunionized workplaces, and state legislation of factory and working conditions, which introduced a regulatory and organizational framework that lead to a reduction in the conditions that generated the sweatshop and in which sweatshops could operate. However, the antisweatshop campaigns and union mobilization of the first three decades of the 20th century did not and has not eliminated hierarchical divisions of labor based on gender, ethnicity, and occupation, or the pejorative notions of skill and unskilled labor in the apparel industries, argues Bender. As well, two structural features of the apparel production chain that were generators of the sweatshop were not eliminated, the dominance of the retail sector over apparel manufacturing and the contracting system.

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