Sweatshop capital : profit, violence, and solidarity movements in the long twentieth century / Beth Robinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Robinson, Beth (Beth Diane), 1982- author.

Series:

e-Duke books scholarly collection

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Anti-sweatshop movement--United States--History--20th century.

Anti-sweatshop movement.

Sweatshops--United States--History--20th century.

Sweatshops.

Consumer goods--United States--History--20th century.

Consumer goods.

Capitalism--United States--History--20th century.

Capitalism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xv, 222 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2025.

Summary:

"In Sweatshop Capital, Beth Robinson examines the evolution of the sweatshop labor practices that produced American consumer products from the late nineteenth- through early twenty-first centuries, as well the labor and social movements that attempted to challenge those conditions. Robinson details how manufacturers used both their influence in government and their mobility to side-step labor laws, maximize profits, and perpetuate abuses while also detailing how groups of workers and their more privileged allies routinely attempted to challenge those efforts by building solidarity networks across race and class lines. Drawing on activists' literature, news accounts, archival sources, and oral history interviews, Sweatshop Capital presents the long history of the anti-sweatshop movements from the garment strikers of the Progressive Era and their allies in the National Consumers' League and the Women's Trade Union League to the understudied direct action and left-wing League of Women Shoppers during the Great Depression to the anti-sweatshop campaigns of the globalization moment of the 1990s through Sweatshop Watch, Global Exchange, and United Students Against Sweatshops. Robinson ends with the current struggles against Amazon and the gig economy, offering an original analysis by stressing historical continuity rather than change, making connections across the persistent dependence of capitalism on exploiting the most vulnerable wage laborers, mostly women and more often immigrant or US women of color"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction

"The Struggle Has but Begun": The Labor Feminism of the Progressive Era

"Don't Overlook Any Channel for Publicity": The Solidarity of the Popular Front

"Settle the Case, or We'll Be in Your Face": The Worldview of the Global Justice Movement

"Amazon Crime": The Omnipresence of the New Global Assembly Line

Conclusion.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Print version: Robinson, Beth (Beth Diane), 1982- Sweatshop capital.

ISBN:

9781478061526

1478061529

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.