Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea by Laura Hapke and Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti‐Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor by Daniel E. Bender

Abstract

Sweatshop: History of an American Idea Laura Hapke. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor Daniel E. Bender. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Laura Hapke's book Sweatshop: History of an American Idea and Daniel Bender's book Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor are complementary works both published in 2004 by Rutgers University Press. Bender covers the topic from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s; while Hapke starts in the 1940s and continues to the present. first part of Hapke's book, The Surveyed, depicts the sweatshop's development from the Massachusetts Lowell Mills of the 1840s to New York's Lower East Side tenements of the 1890s. Gender differences concerning sweatshops are made apparent by the authors, particularly in terms of the role of men and women in the sweatshops and in labor organizations such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Hapke focuses on the role of women after the Shirtwaist Strike of 1909-1910 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, in which 146 people died in a modern tenement built without sanitation and safety considerations. While the sweatshop workplace was condemned by the 1920s, the idea lived on among many workers into the 1930s. Hapke's second part entitled Sweatshop Aesthetics details the New Deal's pictorial treatment of the sweatshops and their workingclass subjects in the chapter called Newsreel of Memory: WPA in the Great Depression. Hapke takes the idea and substance of the sweatshop into the post-World War II industrial and postindustrial world. New ethnic and racial groups, blacks, Asians, and Latinos, replaced the Jews and Italians. While the Age of Affluence (1945-1953) was the time of the unionized sweatshop, the sweatshop jobs were quickly outsourced, immigrant labor serviced new illegal sweatshops, and increasingly Americans worked in postindustrial service jobs. Older unions, particularly the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the ILGWU, merged to form UNITE, an organization pledged to unionize the new sweatshops in American, but as Hapke points out Americans disagreed about the nature of the modern sweatshops, as witnessed by the controversy revolving around the 1998 Smithsonian Institution's exhibit Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of Sweatshops 1820 to the Present held at the National Museum of American History. …