I was in the Netherlands and indeed at the hospital with his wife, Manoshi, and daughter, Piya, one year ago when Arvind Das, founder-editor of Biblio, died. Just one or two months previously I had seen him at the Amsterdam launch, in the Labour History Museum, of Down and Out: Labouring Under Global Capitalism, a book of photos by Ravi Agarwal, the text of which was co-authored with his longtime friend and collaborator, that one-man industry of Indian labor studies, Jan Breman. This book had been recently featured in an issue of Biblio (Vol. 5, Nos 1–2, 2000) that also carried Arvind's review of a new Oxford Book of Work (Das 2000)!

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.

When factory inspectors first used the word “sweatshop” at the turn-of-the-last century, they sought to describe much more than the cramped garment workplaces where immigrants labored. They also tried to explain the social dangers posed by these workplaces. Inspectors relied on their sensory responses. Citing odors as evidence, inspectors united fears of poverty, pestilence, and promiscuity in their definition of the sweatshop. Clothing produced in filthy shops by diseased workers could infect consumers and male and female immigrants working in close quarters were becoming an enfeebled, immoral race. Workers eschewed the language of racial decline, but pointed to their weak bodies as evidence of the exploitative nature of the sweatshop.

The subjectivity of definitions of the sweatshop presents a challenge, especially to public historians. How, in the process of exhibition and reconstruction, can public historians represent the competing moral judgments and racial, class, and gendered fears that shaped initial definitions of the sweatshop?

Taking a long-term perspective, this article charts how sweating was represented in different ways in different periods. It examines the practical difficulties reformers faced when moving from portraying certain images exposing sweated labor to the advocacy of remedies for it. At the turn of the twentieth century, the explanation of sweating as a wider issue of poverty had changed considerably from the narrow definition of sweated labor dating back to the 1840s. Initially this identified needlewomen and male artisans in declining trades as the primary victims of sweating. Jews later stereotypically featured prominently as both exploiters and exploited. By the 1890s, women homeworkers were simultaneously foregrounded as passive victims as well as perpetuators of a degenerate sweated “underclass.” From 1906, those depicted in sensational exhibitions plying their trade of sweated labor were no longer designated as isolated “white slaves” but as exploited citizens denied a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. They were also viewed as a danger to national efficiency. Even so, a Liberal government was only prepared to concede one small anti-sweating measure in the form of the 1909 Trade Boards Act. This piece of legislation was gender neutral and covered homeworkers as well as factory hands. But it encompassed only the most notoriously low-paying industries and less then a quarter of a million workers. Successive British parliaments shied away from enacting a national minimum wage until 1999.

From the post-World War II era to the present, the US garment industry has turned to Latinas as a source of low-wage workers in their countries of origin and as migrants to the United States. The globalization of the garment industry has meant the proliferation of export processing zones overseas and of sweatshops in US cities. Sweatshops, here and there, have become a locus of Latinas' labor in the global economy. This essay examines the impact of this evolving process on Puerto Rican and Dominican women, in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and as labor migrants to New York City. The globalization of the garment industry provides an example of the economic and political connections between the United States and countries of origin that shape migrations, as well as a lens for understanding deteriorating economic conditions in the inner cities.

The analysis in this study is primarily based on the author's research of the Chinese garment industry in New York over the last ten years, her visits to a number of shops in Sunset Park, and her interviews with several dozen workers in the area. By representing a complex picture of the industry, it argues that while labor organizing and law enforcement remain important ways to address labor abuse in the industry, it is imperative for the law enforcement agencies, organized labor and all concerned individuals to understand the complexity embedded in the highly competitive structure of the garment industry, the multi-dimensional impact of labor legislation and law enforcement, and the need to develop new forms of labor organizing informed and responsive to the challenge of the time. Without such an understanding, any effort to curb the sweating phenomenon is likely to be sporadic and have no lasting effect on the industry.

This article explores the role of women in transnational labor organizing. It examines the extent to which transnational protest, based in global cities like New York, Amsterdam, and San Francisco, grants agency to women employed in garment factories throughout the world. It analyzes how the cognitive and material spaces of sites of production are transformed through their connections with other sites—through flows, shifts, and concentrations of capital, bodies, commodities, and in this case, political activities. Throughout, it examines the ways in which women garment workers, garment factories, and sweatshops are employed, defined, and reproduced as a category in varlious contexts of transnational production and protest.

United Students against Sweatshops (USAS) was conceived in 1997 by a handful of organizers and student interns at UNITE (the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Technical Employees). With chapters at 200 universities and colleges, USAS has come a long way from its origins as an advocate for no-sweat licensing policies at campus bookstores. A founder of the Worker Rights Consortium,Founded in April, 2000, the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) is an organization of more than ninety universities, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and labor and civil rights organizations in the United States, Central America, and Asia. Its goal is to establish codes of conduct and verification procedures that guarantee fair wages and working conditions in factories manufacturing university-licensed merchandise. it is by now a broad political movement, campaigning for labor rights inside and outside the university; for economic justice; and for peace in the era of globalization. The evolution of this organization is the subject of an interview with three USAS leaders who came to the organization at different moments in its development. Topics range from international organizing to graduate student unionization. Questions of race, gender and sexual identity have preoccupied USAS since its inception. They figure prominently in the current discussion. The interview was conducted in August, 2001 and edited a few days after September 11, allowing us to include a few reflections on that day and its aftermath.

This review essay discusses five books on the history and contemporary problems of sweated labor. Although different definitions of the problem are reviewed, the various authors under consideration pinpoint a consistent pattern that spans from Paris at the turn of the last century to modern day Los Angeles. The common ground among the studies is a definition that understands “sweating” as a product of the subcontracting process. These books also suggest that the problem of labor standards cannot be separated from the combined forces of competition and consumption. While different approaches to solving the sweatshop issue are touched upon, it is the recalcitrance of the issue that remains the dominant theme in all of these books. The essay ends with a suggestion that seeks to meld both the consumption and production sides of the problem by politicizing the nexus between them through workers taking on the role that the major retail labels now play.

The story of the International Fishermen and Allied Workers' of America (IFAWA), a Pacific North American trade union, allows a closer look at the relation between class-consciousness and common property natural resources. In light of this story, I reexamine the range of organizational forms considered in the literature on common property natural resource management, and conventional assumptions about the context of union organization, to demonstrate that both are excessively narrow. The characterization of fishers and other smallholders as independent entrepreneurs belies the relations of production and class that hold in the fisheries, and organized labor can represent an effective attempt to restructure a particular political ecology. Working-class consciousness emerged among Pacific coast fishers during the first half of the twentieth century, and collective efforts to manage common property reflected that class-consciousness.

Class, Space and Community: A Workshop Conference was organized by the Sociology and Social Policy Department at the University of Durham on April 6–8th, 2001. Academics from a variety of disciplines were brought together to explore the social and cultural implications of deindustrialization on people and communities whose identities were once founded on industrialism and manufacturing. From the detailed accounts about individual lives, communities and regions, and the exact changes they have all been forced to undergo, a general story was told. That is, many areas have recently witnessed the rapid and complete elimination of their industrial bases with seemingly nothing left in their place. Today, the problems these areas face go beyond the matters of massive unemployment. There is also a sense of “folding in on oneself” as the community attempts to find new structures upon which to reinvent itself. “Soft outcomes” such as preserving a sense of pride, dignity and respectability were also shown to be significant to processes of social and economic regeneration. This story is true for places throughout the world. What was especially highlighted by this conference was the way in which an emergent international perspective on deindustrialization was reflected in the combination of very local descriptions of particular localities. Whether it be in Youngstown in Ohio, Consett, Sunderland, or South Shields in northeast England, Nowa Huta in southern Poland, Karhula in Finland, or in South Africa's East Rand, the impacts of globalization and deindustrialization are both real and present for us all today.

The Southern Industrialization Project (SIP), an organization of over 100 academic and public historians devoted to the study of southern industrialization, held its fifth annual meeting at Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta on March 23–24, 2001. In keeping with the theme of getting “past the myth” in considering southern industrialization, many of the papers presented at the meeting dealt with industry in the supposedly nonindustrialized antebellum South. The roles of labor and technology in the industrialization of both the Old and New South received particular attention. The meeting included three sessions and a keynote address.

Korean democratic trade unionism entered the international spotlight for its militancy and massive upsurge in the 1990s, while labor movements in advanced countries had been on the ebb. When the lifelong work of “heavy modernity” was replaced by the labor flexibility of “light modernity,” workers' solidarity gave way to individual workers' solitude. This explains why the trade union movement is more powerful in developing countries such as Korea, Brazil, and South Africa, where Fordism prevails. It is a paradox indeed that Fordism, with its massive production system, was a fertile soil for labor as well as capital.

On March 9, 2001, the Hagley Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society hosted a one-day conference, “Consumption and the Environment,” in Wilmington, Delaware. The idea for the conference and the selection of papers were the work of graduate students in the University of Delaware's Hagley Program in the History of Technology and Industrialization. The organizers made a deliberate effort to “integrate studies of production and consumption,” “highlight the social implications of seemingly personal decisions,” and explore how changing understandings of the environment have shaped consumption choices.

It may seem strange to some people that I and several others travelled from England to the USA for a conference on social class and more especially the working-class. After all, we practically invented social class in England, where the industrial proletariat was born. However, very shortly after arriving at the Center for Working Class studies it became apparent that something rather different and exciting is currently happening to the study of social class and the working-class in the United States. The conference included a truly impressive collection of offerings from a wide variety of academic papers, through performance art and poetry readings to an inspirational session of readings from a new book written and read by steelworkers; The Heat: Steelworker Lives and Legends, (Cedar Hill Publications, Arkansas, 2001). If you haven't read this book yet I would advise you to dash out and buy it now!

The past two decades in China have seen massive internal population movements, a proliferation of forms of property relations, and the wrenching move from a planned socialist to a quasi-capitalist economy. These transformations have responded to, and resulted in, an ongoing restructuring of work and labor. The two books under review offer perspectives on, and insights into, this complex process.

“If you ever want to amount to anything,” Deborah McDowell's grandmother told her repeatedly, “you have to break out of Pipe Shop.” And break out she did; first to her grandmother's world of “semi-privilege” in the hills above her steel town home, then to college at Tuskeegee, and eventually to graduate school and a professorship at the University of Virginia. And yet, she never fully left the Alabama village that surrounded U.S. Pipe and Foundry, where the men of her family had worked since her “ancestors had yoked their prospects for survival to the might of steel” in 1905. Born in 1951, McDowell grew up during the heyday of steel production in the United States, which accounts for her many fond memories from those years and also for her ability to escape the industry that took a crippling toll upon her father, her family, and her community.

Three great global droughts, in 1876-1879, 1889-1891, and 1896-1900, afflicted much of the most populous part of the tropical world in the late nineteenth century. These droughts were the result of what we can now recognize as a more or less regular succession of mega-climatic events known as El Niño. These phenomena occurred previously, notably in the late eighteenth century, but the late nineteenth century events were extraordinarily severe, and death by starvation and disease was on a staggering, unprecedented scale. Estimates of the number who perished range from thirty-one million to sixty-one million people. The sheer magnitude of what can rightly be called a holocaust of non-Western peoples has generally been obscured by a persistent metropolitan perspective, by the social distance from mass suffering of colonial administrative elites and by historians incurious about, or dismissive of, such “cycles of Cathay.” It is a signal service of this impressive, eloquent study that the dimension of this human suffering on a global scale has been both exposed and foregrounded in the operation of late-Victorian formal and informal imperialisms.

This case study of the “red” city of Leipzig seeks to examine the German revolution 1918-1920 not simply from the perspective of World War I, but to look back into prewar years, to see the development of Leipzigers' particularly revolutionary stance as a product of both long- and short-term experiences. In doing so, Dobson concludes that the case of Leipzig refutes generalized assumptions concerning German laborers' complete “integration” into the Wilhelmine system (1890-1918), arguing rather for Leipzig workers' consistent rejection of repressive Wilhelmine authority, and their longstanding alternative vision of a radically democratized society. Dobson argues his case through “relationships,” particularly within and between blue- and white-collar workers.

Through case studies of gender relations in two unions, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) and the International Union of Electrical Workers (IEU), Dennis A. Deslippe argues that working-class feminists were at the vanguard of resurgent feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. In the book's opening chapters, Deslippe synthesizes scholarship in labor and women's history to reiterate that working-class feminists helped shape the policy oriented activism of the union movement and women's organizations between 1945 and the passage of the landmark Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Labor unions actively promoted equal pay legislation after passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 initiated a new phase of labor and management relations characterized by “social unionism”, seeking justice through legislative action, in addition to collective bargaining. Unions pursued equal pay legislation as another means to protect “men's” jobs and wages against competition from lower paid female workers, but rank-and-file women embraced its potential for gender equity. Deslippe adds depth to this fairly familiar story by suggesting that union women's “shifting consciousness” toward an equal rights perspective also occurred because automation exposed the capriciousness of categorizing jobs by sex and led to layoffs.