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Sweatshop labour is characterized by low wages, long hours, and systematic health and safety hazards. Most of the workers in the sweatshops of the garment industry are women, many of them migrant women. This book develops an intersectional feminist critique of the working conditions in sweatshops by analysing the role of gender, race, and migration status in bringing about and justifying the exploitation of workers on factory floors. Based on this analysis, the book argues that sweatshop workers are structurally vulnerable to exploitation in virtue of their position as gendered, racialized, and migrant workers within global supply chains. While this exploitation benefits powerful actors along global supply chains, it also creates spaces of resistance and structural transformation.
List of contents
- Introduction: "Shut Down the Mills"
- 0.1. A Feminist Critique of Sweatshop Labour
- 0.2. Why Sweatshop Labour?
- 0.3. Plan of The Book
- Chapter One. 'Cheap Clothes and Nasty' - Modern Sweatshop Labour
- 1.1. Sweatshop Labour as A Frame of Analysis
- 1.2. Modern Sweatshops
- 1.3. Global Capitalism, Imperialism and Sweatshop Labour
- 1.4. Differences In (Global) Production
- 1.5 Conclusion
- Chapter Two. Towards A Structural Approach to Sweatshop Labour
- 2.1. Micro-Level Perspectives on Sweatshop Labour
- 2.2. Social Structures
- 2.3. Challenges to Micro-Level Perspectives
- 2.4. Challenges for A Structural Analysis of Sweatshop Labour
- 2.5 Conclusion
- Chapter Three. A Marxist Feminist Approach to Sweatshop Labour
- 3.1. Marx on Exploitation and Capitalism
- 3.2. Towards A Normative Reconstruction of Exploitation
- 3.3. Key Characteristics of Marxist/Socialist Feminist Perspectives
- 3.4 Conclusion
- Chapter Four. Exploitation, Marginalisation and Disposability
- 4.1. Sweatshop Labour Relations from A Structural Perspective
- 4.2. Structural Vulnerability
- 4.3. Structural Vulnerability and Relative Power in Sweatshop Labour
- 4.4. Structural Exploitation
- 4.5. Reproducing Exploitation
- 4.6. The Normative Critique of Sweatshop Labour
- 4.7 Conclusion
- Chapter Five. Responsibility For Sweatshop Labour
- 5.1. Moral Responsibility for Sweatshop Labour?
- 5.2. The Grounds of Political Responsibility: Social Connections
- 5.3. Taking Up Political Responsibility
- 5.4. The Moral Status of Political Responsibility
- 5.5. Responsibility in Practice
- Conclusion. Transnational Resistance and Solidarity
- 6.1. Responsibility and Practices of Solidarity
- 6.2. Resistance, Responsibility and Solidarity
- 6.3. Transnational Solidarity: Practices and Institutions
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Mirjam Müller is Assistant Professor in Feminist Philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin. Before coming to Humboldt University Berlin, she was a teaching fellow in political philosophy at King's College London, a postdoctoral fellow at the Hoover Chair at UC Leuven and a postdoctoral fellow at Justitia Amplificata at Free University Berlin.
Summary
Sweatshop labour is characterized by low wages, long hours, and systematic health and safety hazards. Most of the workers in the sweatshops of the garment industry are women, many of them migrant women. Philosopher Mirjam Müller asks: Why are sweatshops so resistant to emancipatory transformation? How should we think about the relationship between class, gender, and race on the factory floor of sweatshops? What insights can be drawn from this for understanding the systematic relation between capitalism, gender oppression, and racial oppression? Does sweatshop labour raise distinct normative concerns compared to other forms of wage labour?
Müller answers these questions by developing a feminist critique of working conditions in the global textile industry that draws on work in feminist, Marxist, post-/decolonial, and critical race theory. She shows how sweatshop labour is embedded in historically specific structures of global capitalism that raise unique normative concerns. The book provides a normative and practical account that highlights spaces of resistance, as well as the responsibility of actors implicated in sweatshop labour relations to work towards structural change.
Based on this analysis, Müller argues that sweatshop workers are structurally vulnerable to exploitation in virtue of their position as gendered, racialized, and migrant workers within global supply chains. While this exploitation benefits powerful actors along global supply chains, it also creates spaces of resistance and structural transformation.
