Introduction Sweatshop USA

The United States has rediscovered its sweatshops. Newspapers and magazines, often otherwise reluctant to give column space to workplace issues, regularly publish dramatic exposés of shocking working conditions in garment sweatshops as nearby as New York and as far afield as El Salvador. In fact, as Smithsonian curators Peter Liebhold and Harry Rubenstein note, the 1995 raid on a sweatshop in El Monte, California, where seventy-two Thai workers labored in shocking conditions and in captivity produced an extraordinary 842 newspaper and magazine stories. ¹ This newfound concern about the sweatshop and sweated work has made its way into everyday conversation and popular culture—perhaps more so than any other kind of labor or workplace. As the journalist Liza Featherstone suggests, shoppers standing outside the Gap in the local mall might very well be discussing the company’s use of sweatshop labor. ²