Sweatshop USA

The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective

Daniel E. Bender, Richard A. Greenwald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136064029
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Economics

For over a century, the sweatshop has evoked outrage and moral repugnance. Once cast as a type of dangerous and immoral garment factory brought to American shores by European immigrants, today the sweatshop is reviled as emblematic of the abuses of an unregulated global economy. This collection unites some of the best recent work in the interdisciplinary field of sweatshop studies. It examines changing understandings of the roots and problems of the sweatshop, and explores how the history of the American sweatshop is inexorably intertwined with global migration of capital, labor, ideas and goods. The American sweatshop may be located abroad but remains bound to the United States through ties of fashion, politics, labor and economics. The global character of the American sweatshop has presented a barrier to unionization and regulation. Anti-sweatshop campaigns have often focused on local organizing and national regulation while the sweatshop remains global. Thus, the epitaph for the sweatshop has frequently been written and re-written by unionists, reformers, activists and politicians. So, too, have they mourned its return.

1

Producing the Sweatshop

1

“A Foreign Method of Working”

Racial Degeneration, Gender Disorder, and the Sweatshop Danger in America

DANIEL E. BENDER

University of Waterloo

Beginning in the 1880s, a veritable army of journalists, politicians, and inspectors explored New York’s Lower East Side, the crowded neighborhood where Eastern-European Jewish and Italian immigrants had found work and cramped housing. These outside observers brought back with them tales of a foreign quarter to share with a curious and frightened middle-class and elite American audience. They described the strange habits of the Lower East Side’s residents and the filth and squalor of the area’s tenement apartments. Most important to their audience, these critics described the neighborhood’s garment contract shops. After all, it was through these shops—and the clothing produced in them—that American, middle- and upper-class New York was linked to working-class and immigrant New York.

The reports of these visitors filled the pages of the city’s newspapers and the nation’s magazines. Exposés of working and living conditions on the Lower East Side were highly personal reactions of outside observers who contrasted their shock, disgust, and revulsion with immigrants’ seeming comfort in the filth and immorality of the garment workplace. Observers described exotic workplaces, rife with dangers, and redolent of the smells of dirty workers and strange food; they were hazy with dust and filled—probably—with invisible germs ready to land on newly produced garments. These were “un-American” shops, the products of urban crowding and unrestricted immigration.

Such personalized narratives of exploration and disgust helped provoke a city, national, and, indeed, international fervor about the dangers posed by these immigrant garment workshops. Local and national politicians, with the aid of factory inspectors, began widely publicized investigations into garment production, in particular into systems of contracting in which retailers contracted out “bundles” of precut cloth to be assembled into garments in small Lower East Side workshops. Two high profile government committees—in 1892, a House of Representatives committee and, in 1901, the Federal Industrial Commission on Immigration—sought to determine the social effects and perils of “foreign-born labor in the clothing trade,” especially Eastern-European Jews. States, including New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois, with sizable garment industries and immigrant populations, also launched their own investigations of immigrants’ garment work.¹ Citing the findings of these investigations, New York State, the epicenter of the American garment industry, passed the Factory Inspection Law in 1886 and substantially revised it in 1892. The law regulated some conditions of labor and required that all tenement garment manufacturers have a permit.²

Politicians sought to differentiate these contracting shops from the “American” factory by labeling them “sweatshops.” The association of these shops with “sweated labor,” a term long associated with immigrants’ jobs, garment work, and arduous, physically draining toil, helped distinguish them as a “foreign method of working.” Condemnations of the sweatshop, thus, merged with and often subsumed criticism of immigrants and fears about the larger social effects of unrestricted immigration. In particular, investigators and politicians came to see the sweatshop as reflective of supposed Jewish racial characteristics. Contemporary understandings of race and, specifically, the process of racial degeneration shaped understandings of the dangers of the sweatshop.

In their investigations, inspectors, journalists, and policymakers claimed to have found the frightening evidence of “racial degeneration.” They argued that sweatshop labor had sent Jewish immigrants, who composed the majority of the sweatshop workforce, tumbling down the racial hierarchy that so many Progressive Era observers used to distinguish differences among immigrant groups. These critics of the sweatshop argued that immigrant groups were part of distinct races capable of ascending or descending a complex and unstable hierarchy. In this way, understandings of the economics of the sweatshop became intertwined with notions of race. This racialization of the economics of the garment industry was part of a larger convergence of biological science and economic theory. Industrialization, many economists and social scientists between 1880 and 1930 argued, was a step in a process of “social evolution.” The workplace itself was now the primary site of evolutionary struggle and the urban marketplace was where the losers and winners of this struggle confronted each other. Thus, class and ethnicity represented more than simple social categories; they were markers of biological status, divisions between winners and losers, civilized and uncivilized.³

Drawing on a vibrant transnational biological and economic discourse that saw the working class itself as divided into a hierarchy with dependants and “defectives” incapable of labor on the bottom and respectable, skilled workers at the top, policymakers cast sweatshop workers as the detritus of “social” or “industrial evolution.” As a class and as a race—these categories were often used interchangeably—Jewish sweatshop workers displayed symptoms of racial degeneracy. As poor immigrants, they necessarily faced the perils of evolutionary, economic struggle. They were neither artisans nor “defectives”—yet. However, they showed all the signs of falling from the ranks of the “industrial” to the “parasitic” classes. In particular, policy makers pointed to moral turpitude, family breakdown, and the rising prevalence of disease among Jewish workers as outward, individual signs of a collective, racial degradation.⁴

This degradation was all the more obvious and threatening because the sweatshop was fundamentally an urban problem. The urban crucible accelerated the process of racial degeneration. As the economist John Commons argued, the city attracted the most defective and dependant of immigrants who sought the plethora of resources and aid offered by social reformers and city governments. Thus, the “least self-reliant or forehanded … races” migrated to the city. For critics, like Commons, worried about the effect of unrestricted immigration, the closing of the American frontier meant that immigrants were huddled in a few urban, industrial centers. Public intoxication, crime, vagrancy, prostitution, family abandonment, and epidemic disease were evidence that “the dangerous effects of city life” were forcing immigrants and their children into the ranks of the “truly parasitic.”

Even worse, racial degeneration, in the heightened economic, evolutionary struggle of the city, could be hereditary. The congestion and economic exchanges of the urban center also meant that racial degeneration was a problem effecting the most “civilized.” The “poverty and pauperism” of immigrant races effected—and, indeed, infected—American classes.Vagrancy, crime, and drunkenness tumbled into the streets and out of ethnic enclaves. Germs and disease bred in the filthy environments of immigrant homes and workplaces, like the tenement sweatshop, and in the bodies of racially less resilient immigrants might lead to urban plagues. And, most ominous, according to some observers, science and urban social reform helped preserve those individuals who would otherwise perish through natural selection. For others, the dynamics of economic competition favored those immigrant races willing to work in abominable conditions. Biological, industrial competition seemed to favor the least desirable immigrants. Such observers feared, as well, that the least resilient, the most immoral, and the least civilized immigrant races—the “low-skilled and inefficient labour”—were reproducing faster than American stock. Rising percentages of foreign-born in cities seemed to confirm this counter-selection. As one worried observer put it immigration hinted at “race suicide” as it was merely “the substitution of one kind of man for another.”⁵

The process of defining the sweatshop in the 1880s and 1890s, as a symptom, cause, and effect of racial degeneration, focused on immigrants. It included them initially only as subjects. Yet even though communication between immigrants and outside observers was difficult—few factory inspectors spoke Yiddish and few garment workers spoke fluent English—the idea of the sweatshop entered immigrants’ own discourse about work. In turn, immigrants’ ideas about the dangers of the sweatshop that generally eschewed notions of racial degradation came to influence reform strategies. In particular, immigrants, reformers, inspectors, and policy makers came to agree that one of the worst problems of the sweatshop was that it had become a source of family disruption and physical (if not, racial) decline.

Race, Biology, and the Sweatshop

In the 1890s, observers in different American states and on both sides of the Atlantic sought to isolate the multiple causes of the sweatshop. Their conclusions depended on a combination of biological, evolutionary, and economic thought.⁶ They argued that sweatshops sprang up because of the system of contracting and subcontracting in which the onus of production was passed on from a manufacturer to a contractor to a subcontractor and, all too frequently, to a subsubcontractor. Shop owners’ compensation was “sweated” from their employees.⁷ The system of contracting and subcontracting degraded working conditions, because contractor shops located work in the home. Also, because of its location, sweatshop wages were so low that male as well as female workers had to work to support their families.⁸ As economist Frank Tracy Carlton argued, “the distinguishing characteristics usually found in a sweated industry are low wages, a long working day, insanitary workshops, and speeded-up workers.” For Carlton, the “adjectives” “low, long, insanitary, and speeded-up” suggested that the sweatshop was fundamentally an urban and immigrant problem. “The conditions favorable to the development of sweated industries,” he wrote, “are found in large cities … where it is easy to obtain immigrant, women, and children laborers…” Because the immigrant sweatshop workforce was one that might, through the process of racial degeneration, become dependent on the benevolence of urban social insurance and reform, the sweatshop was “a ‘parasitic industry.’” It sapped the vitality, strength, and health of its workers while undermining the “factory system.”⁹

Factory inspectors and politicians were so diligent in reporting the immigrant composition of the sweatshop workforce because they considered “the wide development of the contract system … a phase of immigration” and an archaic form of production that had preceded the factory system in the larger process of social evolution. As the sweatshop might cause racial degeneration, its proliferation represented a counterevolutionary development.¹⁰ It was, after all, a type of workplace favored by those from the “least civilized sections of Europe.”¹¹ In defining the sweatshop as a “foreign” workplace, New York’s factory inspectors directly contrasted it to the glorified “American factory” where “you find everything in keeping with the American idea.” Thus, the sociologist and anthropologist Maurice Parmelee suggested that, in the process of social evolution, the “large shop, the factory, and the large capitalist should replace the home and small shop industries and the small capitalist.”¹² But, the racial characteristics of Jews, arriving in large numbers, prevented that from happening.

Inspectors and observers blamed the “racial characteristics of the Jew” for the problems of the sweatshop. The Industrial Commission, for example, explained that racially Jews were unfit for factory production. As a race, they were too “individualistic” for the “discipline of the factory.” Piecework proliferated and workdays lengthened “because the Jewish people are peculiarly eager to earn a big day’s wages, no matter at what sacrifice.”¹³ The inferior, internal characteristics of Jews, inspectors seemed to suggest, were mirrored in the condition of their bodies; mind and body were intertwined. After all, as economist Commons insisted, a worker “can only exercise the gifts which nature has endowed him.” Thus, according to Commons, the Jew “prefers the sweatshop.”¹⁴ The individualism of Jews was reflected in the weakness of their bodies. As a “race subject to contempt,” the economist Jesse Pope argued, Eastern-European Jews lacked the skills or strength for facto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Global and Historical Perspective
• PART 1. Producing the Sweatshop
• PART 2. Sweatshop Migrations
• PART 3. Sweatshop Resistance
• Index