No Sweat: Hard Lessons from Garment Industry History

Abstract

This thanksgiving 2006 will witness the anniversary almost to the day ninety-seven years ago, when the immigrant shopgirls of New York's shirtwaist factories called a general strike. This past April, and then on May Day, immigrant workers, 120 years after the first strike movement for the eight-hour day (May Day, 1886), asserted their claim to just treatment. The fall and rise of sweatshop labor in New York and elsewhere in the global garment industry is a story with lessons for our time, for the struggles over the sweatshop issue today echo the issues and contentions of a century ago. Then, as now, there was tension between workers and their middle-class allies.

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