No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers.

• Author: Goldman, Ruth

No Sweat: Fashion, Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers edited by Andrew Ross Verso. 313 pages. $19.00.

This refreshing collection--part history, part critique, and part activist handbook--is the result of a 1996 conference on the eighty-fifth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers includes commentary from human-rights activists, academics, garment workers, trade unionists, journalists, and even a CEO or two. Since "sweatshops today come in all shapes and sizes," Ross argues that these various commentaries are necessary "to apply pressure at all points in the chain: from world-trade policy to international human rights, workplace regulation, labor organizing, consumer politics, and fashion."

Several authors in this book explicitly link the fashion industry with the exploitative conditions prevalent in garment-production facilities.

As McKenzie Wark argues, "Increasingly, fashion has become a culture industry which cannot entirely subordinate its cultural product to the patterns of industrialization and the international division of labor. Indeed, fashion and clothing present a real problem for matching the rhythms of consumption with those of the production cycle." The growth of pop culture, he says, means that urban streets have replaced Paris and Milan as fashion's center, creating a relentless demand for new styles.

Michael Piore links the return of the sweatshop to the decline of government regulations and union strength.

Elinor Spielberg takes on child labor in Bangladesh. "It is a myth that children are employed because of their nimble fingers," she says. "Children are hired because they are the most exploitable work force in the world."

Charles Kernaghan, the leader of the National Labor Committee, includes a long letter to Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney, documenting the painfully low wages and poor working conditions of the Haitian people who sew the Pocahontas shirts that were so popular a couple of years ago. The accompanying photographs of dismal shantytowns are juxtaposed...