Sweatshop USA

For over a century the sweatshop has evoked outrage and moral repugnance. Once cast as a type of dangerous and immoral garment factory brought to American shores by European immigrants today the sweatshop is reviled as emblematic of the abuses of an unregulated global economy. This collection unites some of the best recent work in the interdisciplinary field of sweatshop studies. It examines changing understandings of the roots and problems of the sweatshop and explores how the history of the American sweatshop is inexorably intertwined with global migration of capital labor ideas and goods. The American sweatshop may be located abroad but remains bound to the United States through ties of fashion politics labor and economics. The global character of the American sweatshop has presented a barrier to unionization and regulation. Anti-sweatshop campaigns have often focused on local organizing and national regulation while the sweatshop remains global. Thus the epitaph for the sweatshop has frequently been written and re-written by unionists reformers activists and politicians. So too have they mourned its return.