ABSTRACT
WHEN CHARLES KERNAGHAN PREPARED to appear before a congressional committee in the spring of 1996 to testify on abuses in overseas factories making clothes for U.S. retailers, he didn’t expect much publicity. Kernaghan, a longtime labor rights activist and director of the New York City-based National Labor Committee (NLC), had done exposes on factory abuses before, and most of them had failed to gain widespread attention. In recent months the issue of sweatshops had begun to receive more notice, as proven by Kernaghan’s just-completed campaign to force the Gap to accept independent monitoring of a factory in El Salvador. But aside from some garment industry trade unionists and a scattering of veteran social justice activists, most people in the United States didn’t even know sweatshops existed.
