| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Ellen Israel Rosen, Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press 2002)

THE APPAREL INDUSTRY has figured prominently in processes of industrialization and in the struggles of the Western labour movement. In the context of a globalizing economy it again provides the textbook case, illustrating, in a new way, the principles of relentless capital accumulation, the supporting role of states, and the effects of hegemonic policies on workers. Making Sweatshops is bound to become the authoritative treatment illustrating these principles in the globalization of the US apparel industry. Ellen Israel Rosen offers a thorough understanding of developments in the industry and presents a story that keeps the reader glued to the text. This is an intelligent book that everyone interested in globalization should read.

Rosen argues that markets are not natural phenomena, but complex political institutions. Global markets gain their peculiar shape through rules codified in trade agreements, labour laws, and constructions of gender. Understanding markets as institutions allows her to link the globalization of the apparel industry to US foreign policy, anti-union, and gender politics.

Her narrative begins after World War II with the reconstruction of the Japanese textile industry under US occupation. The closure of the Chinese market for Japanese products, surpluses in the US cotton industry, and the desire to contain communism came together to shape a policy of opening US markets for Japanese garments. In the 1950s, the US desire to counteract the perceived falling of Asian dominoes motivated similar strategies with regard to South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and contributed to the economic development of these countries. In all cases women workers, paid considerably less than men, constituted the bulk of the labour force.

The Eisenhower administration never succeeded in reconciling America's security aspirations with the demands of American industry for protection from increasing Asian competition. The Kennedy administration found a solution to this problem in GATT trade agreements, which enabled a funneling of Asian exports to European markets. Import quotas became the means of choice, limiting Asian exports into the US. The Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) multilaterally regularized the quota-based trade restrictions that characterized this first phase of the liberal trade regime.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration launched a full-scale attack on limitations to free trade in clothing, circumventing defensive mechanisms allowed under the MFA against Chinese quota violations and vetoing protectionist legislation passed in Congress. Neoliberal orthodoxy and the discovery of new communist threats in Central America and the Caribbean motivated a regional free trade arrangement, the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI). The initiative included requirements for structural adjustment of Caribbean economies in exchange for financial support to develop non-traditional exports. Though the CBI excluded apparel, it functioned to accelerate apparel imports from the Caribbean region. US manufacturers took advantage of US Tariff Schedule 807.00, which allowed them to subtract US-fabricated components from the value of goods imported from the region for tariff purposes. Expanded in 1987 to allow unlimited quotas for imports from the Caribbean, the provision fostered the formation of export-processing zones and played a key role in enabling "just-in-time" production. It helped turn the Caribbean Basin into "America's new garment district." (215)

The North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), paired with fiscal reforms imposed on Mexico by the IMF, expanded this logic of regional trade. While NAFTA allowed inputs to be procured from the three participating countries, it retained rules of origin that locked out Asian competitors and institutionalized a "nonprotectionist form of protection" for US textile companies. (203) Bilateral trade agreements between the US and individual Latin American countries proliferated in the 1990s, as did regional trade alliances that stiffened competition among countries exporting to the US. The 1996 African Growth and Opportunity Act extended free trade and rule-of-origin policies to Africa.

Players in the US textile and apparel industries have come to favour different trade strategies. Whereas the textile industry benefits from rule-of-origin protections, the apparel industry sources internationally and favours free trade without restrictions. Large-scale retailers have emerged as key political players who also favour free trade. Unions, that in the 1950s were supportive of free trade with industrialized countries, fiercely oppose contemporary free-trade arrangements with developing countries that they believe undermine wages and labour standards and foster a "race to the bottom."

In 1994, the Multifibre Arrangement expired. It was replaced by the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) which was included in the treaty establishing the World Trade Organization (WTO). ATC prescribes the gradual phasing out of all quotas by 2005 and a substantial lowering of tariffs for textiles and apparel. China, the US's fiercest competitor in textile and apparel, now is a member of the WTO and will no longer be subject to quotas. US apparel producers are celebrating this new "freedom," while US textile producers are scrambling to open factories globally.

Throughout the book, Rosen shows that trade policies are labour and industrial policies and reproduce gender inequalities. There is a parallel between the Taft-Hartley act, which encouraged the movement of garment factories from the Northeast to Southern "right to work" states, and free trade policies that encourage the movement of firms to "structurally adjusted" developing countries. And the freeing of trade in the apparel industry has effected a movement of US women workers into retailing, producing a new gendering of the labour force: almost 40 per cent of women in the US labour force today work in retailing, and 79 per cent of them earn an hourly wage of $7.91 or less.

Rosen ends her narrative by asking who are the winners and who are the losers in the globalization of the apparel industry. She adduces evidence to show the gains of apparel manufacturers and the increased salaries of their CEOs. She also shows the losses for garment and textile workers, mostly women. Job losses have been particularly devastating for them, as they typically take longer to find new jobs and are rehired at considerably lower wages. Production workers have seen their wages dive globally, and the conditions of workers in export-processing zones today often are worse than those in the Massachusetts textile mills of the 19th century. Finally, workers have seen the reemergence of sweatshops; the majority of garment assembly jobs in New York today violate labour laws. Gains to consumers asserted by neo-liberals are questionable because neo-liberal models do not account for differences in power of economic players; indeed capitalists gain disproportionately, and there are minimal gains for those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy (often women). Protectionism, Rosen reminds the reader, is a progressive tax.

It is difficult, in a brief summary, to convey the richness of empirical detail and freshness of interpretation that characterize this book. Taking on liberal ideologues while illustrating the contradictions and complexities of globalization processes, the book is an exercise in passionate scholarship at its best.


Elisabeth Prügl Florida International University

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