Suchergebnisse

From the first usage in nineteenth-century America of the term "sweatshop," the definition of this emotive term has "reflected social anxiety about global flows and exchange of people, goods, culture, and capital," Bender and Greenwald write in their useful edited volume, Sweatshops USA. And if the term sweatshop today connotes a race to the bottom in which a market structure of intense competition reflects the absence, or lack of the enforcement of, effective protective legislation across the relevant market, then there is little basically new in the organization of garment production and the unrelenting pressures on its workers. Essential characteristics of sweated labor in the industry result from structural characteristics which have remained and are only ameliorated by strong unions, public concern for the conditions of labor, and enforced social regulation. While it has often seemed to be an outlier in its exploitative norms, the idea that garment work is totally unique in the flexibility it demands, the excesses and abuses inherent in the contracting system with its pressures to respond to unpredictable and rapidly changing fashion, its production of a labor-intensive product not easily mechanized, and its ability to seek out and control a vulnerable labor force is a misjudgment. It is rather an industry which represents an extreme but not a different form of the way labor markets operate. It is not a vanishing past but a worrisome globalized future of just-in-time production and multisourced internationalized commodity chain organization of production which should be worrying.

A review of Eiji Takemae's Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy (New York & London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002). Takemae's examination of the implications of the Allied Occupation & subsequent democratization processes for Japan is welcomed for demonstrating how some Japanese perceived the WWII era as the product of US cultural imperialism while others welcomed the Allied Occupation as an alternative to Japan's traditional autocratic-militaristic government. Specific attention is directed toward Takemae's analysis of the US's exclusion of its Soviet allies from becoming involved in Japanese affairs & the role General Douglas MacArthur played in recreating Japanese society & government following the end of WWII. Indeed, Takemae is commended for highlighting the various internal & external forces, particularly MacArthur & the GHQ, that shaped Japanese politics during the Allied Occupation & the MacArthur regime's unsuccessful attempt to topple the predominant zaibatsu within Japanese society. In addition, Takemae's analysis of the political reforms enjoyed by Japanese women, the significance of Japanese-American Nisei in facilitating Japan's democratic transition, & the emergence of economic neoliberalism in post-WWII Japan are addressed. Adapted from the source document.

Understood as "race to the bottom," globalization means transferring transnational companies' plants to locations with lower labor costs. The cases of job outsourcing to China & India & the differences between investing in vs outsourcing jobs to developing countries are discussed. The US labor movement has responded to this development by demanding protection against immigrants & imports, but this strategy is both divisive & ineffective: divisive because outsourced jobs do not feel oppressive to local workers, since the poor wages at those jobs still mean an increase in pay for them, & ineffective because the goal should be human development & empowerment of the many. The race to the bottom has spurred the anti-capitalism & anti-globalization movements into reframing a positive vision of international solidarity & social justice. M. Pflum

Understood as "race to the bottom," globalization means transferring transnational companies' plants to locations with lower labor costs. The cases of job outsourcing to China & India & the differences between investing in vs outsourcing jobs to developing countries are discussed. The US labor movement has responded to this development by demanding protection against immigrants & imports, but this strategy is both divisive & ineffective: divisive because outsourced jobs do not feel oppressive to local workers, since the poor wages at those jobs still mean an increase in pay for them, & ineffective because the goal should be human development & empowerment of the many. The race to the bottom has spurred the anti-capitalism & anti-globalization movements into reframing a positive vision of international solidarity & social justice. M. Pflum