No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers - Softcover

Ross, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1859841724 ISBN 13: 9781859841723

Publisher: Verso Books, 1997

Synopsis

Are you aware that the T-shirt or running shoes you're wearing may have been produced by a 13-year-old children working 14-hour days for 30 cents an hour? The clothing sweatshop, as a recent string of media exposés has revealed, is back in business. Don't be fooled by a label which says the item was made in the USA or Europe. It could have been sewed on in Haiti or Indonesia-or in a domestic workshop, where conditions rival those in the third world. The label might tell you how to treat the garment but it says nothing about how the worker who made it was treated. To find out about that you need to read this book. No Sweat will show you:
How Michael Jordan earned more for endorsing Nike running shoes than the company's 30,000 Indonesian workers get between them in a year.
How Disney CEO Michael Eisner's annual pay and stock options, worth $200 million, are paid for out of profits from the sale of Pocahontas and Hunchback of Notre Dame T-shirts made by Haitian teenagers working for less than $10 per week and force-fed contraceptive pills.
How companies like the Gap and Wal-Mart (producer of the Kathie Lee Gifford line) have been forced into embarrassing concessions after successful campaigning by the New York-based National Labor Committee, the American garment workers union UNITE and the European-based Clean Clothes Campaign.
How you can join the growing global campaign of consumer groups, human rights activists, and international labor organizations to close down sweatshops and guarantee basic rights for those who cut and sew our clothes.
In hard-hitting words and pictures, No Sweat surveys the chasm between the glamor of the catwalk and the squalor of the sweatshop.
Don't go shopping without it!

About this title

About the Authors

Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and a social activist. A contributor to the Nation, Village Voice, New York Times, and Artforum, he is the author of many books, including, most recently, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City and Nice Work if You Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. He lives in New York.

Angela McRobbie is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

McKenzie Wark is best known for a series of books of twenty-first century critical theory, including A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, and Capital is Dead. She has also written works that contribute to an alternate history of Marxism, including Leaving the Twentieth Century and Molecular Red. Her survey books on contemporary theory and problems in collaborative knowledge production are General Intellects and Sensoria. She also writes in an autotheoretical style in books such as Dispositions, Philosophy for Spiders, Raving and Love and Money, Sex and Death. She is a professor of media and cultural studies at a university in New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1859841724
• ISBN 13: 9781859841723
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 324