BiblioVault - Books about Anti-sweatshop movement

Clean Clothes

A Global Movement to End Sweatshops

Liesbeth Sluiter

Pluto Press, 2009

The Clean Clothes Campaign is a worldwide movement that aims to improve the wages and conditions of sweatshop workers. This is the story of their struggle.

Large retailers such as Tesco, Walmart and Carrefour lure shoppers in with prices that seem too good to be true. This book shows that they're too good to be fair. All along the industry's supply chain, workers, often children, are exploited through poverty wages, unpaid overtime and harsh anti-union measures. The campaign urges those in charge of the garment industry's supply lines to protect their workers and treat them fairly.

This dynamic account of direct engagement by concerned consumers is a must read for those that see globalisation differently and want their shopping choices to support the most vulnerable people involved in the clothing industry.

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Strategizing against Sweatshops

The Global Economy, Student Activism, and Worker Empowerment

Matthew S. Williams

Temple University Press, 2020

For the past few decades, the U.S. anti-sweatshop movement was bolstered by actions from American college students. United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) effectively advanced the cause of workers’ rights in sweatshops around the world. Strategizing against Sweatshops chronicles the evolution of student activism and presents an innovative model of how college campuses are a critical site for the advancement of global social justice.

Matthew Williams shows how USAS targeted apparel companies outsourcing production to sweatshop factories with weak or non-existent unions. USAS did so by developing a campaign that would support workers organizing by leveraging their college’s partnerships with global apparel firms like Nike and Adidas to abide by pro-labor codes of conduct.

Strategizing against Sweatshops exemplifies how organizations and actors cooperate across a movement to formulate a coherent strategy responsive to the conditions in their social environment. Williams also provides a model of political opportunity structure to show how social context shapes the chances of a movement’s success—and how movements can change that political opportunity structure in turn. Ultimately, he shows why progressive student activism remains important.

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Sweated Work, Weak Bodies

Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor

Bender, Daniel E.

Rutgers University Press, 2004

In the early 1900s, thousands of immigrants labored in New Yorks Lower East Side sweatshops, enduring work environments that came to be seen as among the worst examples of Progressive-Era American industrialization. Although reformers agreed that these unsafe workplaces must be abolished, their reasons have seldom been fully examined.

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies is the first book on the origins of sweatshops, exploring how they came to represent the dangers of industrialization and the perils of immigration. It is an innovative study of the language used to define the sweatshop, how these definitions shaped the first anti-sweatshop campaign, and how they continue to influence our current understanding of the sweatshop.

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Sweatshop Capital

Profit, Violence, and Solidarity Movements in the Long Twentieth Century

Beth Robinson

Duke University Press, 2025

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 as 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 sidestep 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 rein them in.

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Unraveling the Garment Industry

Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work

Ethel C. Brooks

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Unraveling the Garment Industry is an ambitious investigation of the politics of labor and protest within an industry that has come to define the possibilities and abuses of globalization and its feminized labor: the garment industry. Focusing on three labor rights movements—against GAP clothing in El Salvador, child labor in Bangladesh, and sweatshops in New York City—Ethel C. Brooks examines how transnational consumer protest campaigns effect change, sometimes with unplanned penalties for those they intend to protect.

Brooks analyzes a two-pronged problem in consumer boycott campaigns against labor abuse in the garment industry. First, how are we to understand the political necessities of local protest such as the right to unionize against the emphasis placed on consumer boycotts? Second, what and whose agency is privileged or obscured within the symbolic economies and the politics of information deployed by these campaigns? Tying both of these questions together is a commitment to seeing globalization as embedded in the everyday realities of the local.

Drawing attention to the race, class, and gender assumptions central to powerful consumer boycotts, Brooks reveals how these movements unintentionally reinforce the global economic forces they denounce.

Ethel C. Brooks is assistant professor of women’s and gender studies and sociology at Rutgers University.

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