Introduction

Extract

Sweatshops are very much in fashion, favored as a strategy of global capitalism and flexible specialization, fought against by union and student activists, and featured in exposes in the daily press and on TV news. Hundreds of thousands of men, and especially women, in dozens of countries across the globe currently work in conditions considered sweated by one of the several definitions that are used by trade unionists, academics, activists, and workers themselves. Hundreds of thousands more will spend at least a part of their working lives in the export processing zones and maquiladores of the Caribbean, Latin America, India, and South East and East Asia. Tens of thousands will migrate to the United States, where sweatshops once again abound in major cities, such as Los Angeles and New York. Far from being an aberration or an archaic holdover from an earlier era of industrialization, the sweatshop has proven to be an integral part of modern capitalism.