ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Sweatshop Capital, Beth Robinson examines the brutal sweatshop labor conditions that produced American consumer goods from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, as well the labor and social movements that contested them. Arguing that sweatshop labor is a persistent feature of capitalism, she shows how manufacturers used both their influence in government and their mobility to side-step US labor laws, maximize profits, and perpetuate abuses. She outlines how workers and their allies routinely confronted manufacturers by building solidarity networks across race, class, and national lines. Drawing on activists’ literature, news accounts, archival sources, and oral histories, Robinson presents the long history of the antisweatshop movements that responded to American capital’s pursuit of profit through hyperexploitation with a wide range of protest, legal action, and creativity. Beginning with the sweatshops and reformers of the Progressive Era, Robinson moves through the Great Depression and the activism of the Popular Front, the “free trade” globalization of the 1990s and its discontents, and, finally, the global cyber and gig economies of the twenty-first century and the growing movements to reel them in.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Beth Robinson is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

REVIEWS

“Putting the fight against sweatshops in broad perspective, Beth Robinson connects the violation of labor standards to the shifting political economy of the United States. She argues for the persistent dependence of capitalism on the exploitation of the most vulnerable wage laborers, mostly women and more often immigrant or US women of color. A new generation of students and activists will find inspiration in these pages that memorialize the past to generate the knowledge for making a better future.”
-- Eileen Boris, author of Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019

“Sweatshop Capital traces the historical through-line of antisweatshop activism to demonstrate that this history has much to teach us about the contemporary manifestations of sweated labor and our collective efforts to challenge worker exploitation. Beth Robinson mines valuable lessons from both the successes and failures of feminist activism to powerfully remind us that feminism has made important contributions to labor history.”
-- Mary Margaret Fonow, author of Union Women: Forging Feminism in the United Steelworkers of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS