A New Kind of Rag Trade? The Politics of British Fashion design

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McRobbie, Angela. 1997. A New Kind of Rag Trade? The Politics of British Fashion design. In: Andrew Ross, ed. No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Workers: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers. New York: Verso, pp. 275-290. ISBN 978-1859841723 [Book Section]

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Are you aware that the T-shirt or the running shoes you are wearing may have been produced by children as young as 13 years old, working 14-hour days for 30 cents an hour? Don't be reassured by a label that claims the item was manufactured in the USA or Europe. It could have been sewn in Haiti or Indonesia -- or in a domestic sweatshop where conditions rival those in the Third World. The label may tell you how to treat the garment, but it says nothing of how the worker who made it was treated. To find out about that you need to read this book. No Sweat shows you: * How Michael Jordan earned more for endorsing Nike running shoes that then company's 30,000 Indonesian workers get between them in a year. * How Disney CEO Michael Eisner's annual pay and stock options, worth $200 million, are partly paid for out of profits from the sale of Pocahontas and Hunchback of Notre Dame T-shirts made by Haitian teenagers who work for less than $10 per week and are force-fed contraceptive pills. * How companies like GAP and Wal-Mart (producer of the Kathie Lee Gifford line), have been forced into embarrassing concessions after successful campaigning by the New York-based National Labor Committee, the American garment workers union UNITE and the European-based Clean Clothes Campaign. * How you can join the growing global campaign of consumer groups, human rights activists and international labor organizations to close down sweatshops and guarantee basic rights for those who cut and sew our clothes. In hard-hitting words and pictures, No Sweat tells the story of the chasm between the glamour of the catwalk and the squalor of the sweatshop. Don't go shopping without it.

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