An early draft of Lawrence Boyd' review of Sweatshop USA mistakenly appeared in the September issue. The final version appears here.

Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective Edited by John Bender and Richard Greenwald. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. xi, 300. $90.95, cloth; $26.95, paper.

This is an anthology of various works in an interdisciplinary field that the editors define as “sweatshop studies.” The essays analyze the sweatshop from a variety of perspectives that include history, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and political science. One discipline that is notably absent from this list is economics, and this does detract from what is otherwise an interesting body of work. For example, little reference is made to incomes and standards of living of sweatshop workers historically and globally.

A notable exception in this collection is Xiaolan Bao' essay on Chinese garment factories in Brooklyn, New York during 1995. Bao uses interviews to find that most workers there earn $20,000 annually for “10 to 12 hour days.” That wages are low and these workers are poor is assumed, but it would have been interesting to have this question taken up in more detail.

As with any anthology one can easily pick and choose among essays. This particular anthology does have various themes within it, specifically the “Historical and Global Perspective” of the title. These themes do provide some interesting insights in that they trace the issue of sweatshops through time and across various places.

For example, the very definition of the sweatshop was historically rooted in the 1890s and conveyed a cultural as well as an economic meaning. The term today continues to evoke an image of low pay and poor working conditions. As Daniel Bender points out in his essay “A Foreign Method of Working,” politicians used the term “sweatshop” to differentiate small garment factories in New York from the “American factory system.” Bender points out that the lens through which the sweatshop was viewed by some, including economists such as Richard T. Ely and John Commons, was of social evolution where biological competition (as opposed to economic competition) favored the least advanced races of immigrants and thus raised fears of “race suicide.” This can be compared with a 1994 U.S. General Accounting Office definition of a sweatshop as merely a workplace that “violates one or more federal or state labor laws.” The word “sweatshop” continues to imply fears that a standard of living will be lost to “foreign competition” domestically through immigrants, or through imports.

Another theme is that “sweatshops” have tended to be found in the garment industry, and within that industry among shops that “contract” work for larger firms. This was not only the case in the 1890s with immigrant shops in New York but also the shops there in 1995. These also characterize international production in Mexico and the Far East. In this institutional framework large “brand names” contract out work to smaller firms that is sometimes further subcontracted out to other even smaller firms. This common institutional framework that runs across time and place has some interesting possibilities.

On the whole this anthology does provide insights into sweatshops; not the least is that many writing in this volume seem to assume that they are an anomaly in need of explanation rather than a pervasive condition of industrialization.