No Sweat


Book Description

"In hard-hitting words and pictures, No Sweat surveys the chasm between the glamour of the catwalk and the squalor of the sweatshop." -- Book Jacket.




Sewing Women


Book Description

Classical Japanese: A Grammar is a comprehensive, and practical guide to classical Japanese. Extensive notes and historical explanations make this volume useful as both a reference for advanced students and a textbook for beginning students. The volume, which explains how classical Japanese is related to modern Japanese, includes detailed explanations of basic grammar, including helpful, easy-to-use tables of grammatical forms; annotated excerpts from classical premodern texts. Classical Japanese: A Grammar - Exercise Answers and Tables (ISBN: 978-0-231-13530-6) is now available for purchase as a separate volume.







Unmaking the Global Sweatshop


Book Description

Unmaking the Global Sweatshop gathers the work of leading anthropologists and ethnographers studying the global garment industry's impact on workers' well-being and examines the relationship between the politics of labor and initiatives to protect workers' health and safety.




Murder in the Garment District


Book Description

The thrilling and true account of racketeering and union corruption in mid-century New York, when unions and the mob were locked in a power struggle that reverberates to this day In 1949, in New York City's crowded Garment District, a union organizer named William Lurye was stabbed to death by a mob assassin. Through the lens of this murder case, prize-winning authors David Witwer and Catherine Rios explore American labor history at its critical turning point, drawing on FBI case files and the private papers of investigative journalists who first broke the story. A narrative that originates in the garment industry of mid-century New York, which produced over 80 percent of the nation's dresses at the time, Murder in the Garment District quickly moves to a national stage, where congressional anti-corruption hearings gripped the nation and forever tainted the reputation of American unions. Replete with elements of a true-crime thriller, Murder in the Garment District includes a riveting cast of characters, from wheeling and dealing union president David Dubinsky to the notorious gangster Abe Chait and the crusading Robert F. Kennedy, whose public duel with Jimmy Hoffa became front-page news. Deeply researched and grounded in the street-level events that put people's lives and livelihoods at stake, Murder in the Garment District is destined to become a classic work of history—one that also explains the current troubled state of unions in America.




The Garment Worker


Book Description




Labor, Global Supply Chains, and the Garment Industry in South Asia


Book Description

This book argues that larger flaws in the global supply chain must first be addressed to change the way business is conducted to prevent factory owners from taking deadly risks to meet clients’ demands in the garment industry in Bangladesh. Using the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster as a departure point, and to prevent such tragedies from occurring in the future, this book presents an interdisciplinary analysis to address the disaster which resulted in a radical change in the functioning of the garment industry. The chapters present innovative ways of thinking about solutions that go beyond third-party monitoring. They open up possibilities for a renewed engagement of international brands and buyers within the garment sector, a focus on direct worker empowerment using technology, the role of community-based movements, developing a model of change through enforceable contracts combined with workers movements, and a more productive and influential role for both factory owners and the government. This book makes key interventions and rethinks the approaches that have been taken until now and proposes suggestions for the way forward. It engages with international brands, the private sector, and civil society to strategize about the future of the industry and for those who depend on it for their livelihood. A much-needed review and evaluation of the many initiatives that have been set up in Bangladesh in the wake of Rana Plaza, this book is a valuable addition to academics in the fields of development studies, gender and women’s studies, human rights, poverty and practice, political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, and South Asian studies.




All Together Different


Book Description

In the early 1930’s, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) organized large numbers of Black and Hispanic workers through a broadly conceived program of education, culture, and community involvement. The ILGWU admitted these new members, the overwhelming majority of whom were women, into racially integrated local unions and created structures to celebrate ethnic differences. All Together Different revolves around this phenomenon of interracial union building and worker education during the Great Depression. Investigating why immigrant Jewish unionists in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) appealed to an international force of coworkers, Katz traces their ideology of a working-class based cultural pluralism, which Daniel Katz newly terms “mutual culturalism,” back to the revolutionary experiences of Russian Jewish women. These militant women and their male allies constructed an ethnic identity derived from Yiddish socialist tenets based on the principle of autonomous national cultures in the late nineteenth century Russian Empire. Built on original scholarship and bolstered by exhaustive research, All Together Different offers a fresh perspective on the nature of ethnic identity and working-class consciousness and contributes to current debates about the origins of multiculturalism.




The Garment Worker


Book Description




Unraveled


Book Description

Longlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award A groundbreaking chronicle of the birth--and death--of a pair of jeans, that exposes the fractures in our global supply chains, and our relationships to each other, ourselves, and the planet Take a look at your favorite pair of jeans. Maybe you bought them on Amazon or the Gap; maybe the tag says "Made in Bangladesh" or "Made in Sri Lanka." But do you know where they really came from, how many thousands of miles they crossed, or the number of hands who picked, spun, wove, dyed, packaged, shipped, and sold them to get to you? The fashion industry operates with radical opacity, and it's only getting worse to disguise countless environmental and labor abuses. It epitomizes the ravages inherent in the global economy, and all in the name of ensuring that we keep buying more while thinking less about its real cost. In Unraveled, entrepreneur, researcher, and advocate Maxine Bédat follows the life of an American icon--a pair of jeans--to reveal what really happens to give us our clothes. We visit a Texas cotton farm figuring out how to thrive without relying on fertilizers that poison the earth. Inside dyeing and weaving factories in China, where chemicals that are banned in the West slosh on factory floors and drain into waterways used to irrigate local family farms. Sewing floors in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are crammed with women working for illegally low wages to produce garments as efficiently as machines. Back in America, our jeans get stowed, picked, and shipped out by Amazon warehouse workers pressed to be as quick as the robots primed to replace them. Finally, those jeans we had to have get sent to landfills--or, if they've been "donated," shipped back around the world to Africa, where they're sold for pennies in secondhand markets or buried and burned in mountains of garbage. A sprawling, deeply researched, and provocative tour-de-force, Unraveled is not just the story of a pair of pants, but also the story of our global economy and our role in it. Told with piercing insight and unprecedented reporting, Unraveled challenges us to use our relationship with our jeans--and all that we wear--to reclaim our central role as citizens to refashion a society in which all people can thrive and preserve the planet for generations to come.