A Century of Sweat: Subcontracting, Flexibility, and Consumption

International Labor and Working-Class History

Volumn 61, Issue , 2002, Pages 128-140

  Cowie, Jefferson ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0036014620     PISSN: 01475479     EISSN: 14716445     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0147547902000091     Document Type: Review

References (9)

1. For the official definition, see U.S. Government Accounting Office, Sweatshops in the U.S. (Washington, DC: GAO, 1988).
2. For the concept of the living wage, see Lawrene B. Glick-man, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)
3. Robert Pollin and Stephanie Luce, The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy (New York: The New Press, 1998).
4. John R. Commons, “The Sweating System” in Leon Stein, ed., Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy (New York: Quadrangle, 1977): 44–5.
5. The deregulated trucking industry is a good non-garment industry example. As Michael H. Belzer argues, “Most over-the-road truck drivers are paid according to a piecework standard … To augment their earnings, they ‘sweat’ their labor-they increase the intensity of their work and extend their hours … the broad expansion of the use of owner operators in the trucking industry (like subcontracting in other industries) has opened a Pandora's box that contributes to the broad expansion of sweatshop conditions.” See Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking and Deregulation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 8–9.
6. Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 264.
7. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, Mark Poster ed., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 50
8. For a recent scholarly overview on organizing workers in California, see Ruth Milkman, ed., Organizing Immigrants: The Challenge for Unions in Contemporary California (Ithaca: Cornell/ILR Press, 2000).
9. For a discussion of the untapped power of pop music to help labor struggles, see Joe Vehlein, “An Overture into the Future: The Music of Social Justice,” New Labor Forum 9 (Fall/Winter: 2001): 25–34.