The Garment & Textile Manufacturing Industry

This book explores the combination of capital’s changing composition and labour’s subjective agency to examine whether the waning days of the ‘sweatshop’ have indeed begun. Focused on the garment and footwear sectors, it introduces a universal logic that governs competition and reshapes the chain. By analysing workers’ collective action at various sites of production, it observes how this internal logic plays out for labour who are testing the limits of the social order, stretching it until the seams show. By examining the most valorised parts of underdeveloped sectors, one can see where capital is going and how it is getting there. These findings contribute to ongoing efforts to establish workers’ rights in sectors plagued by poverty and powerlessness, building fires and collapses. With this change and a capable labour movement, there’s hope yet that workers may close the gap.

Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (2017)

The power of unions in workers’ lives and in the American political system has declined dramatically since the 1970s. In recent years, many have argued that the crisis took root when unions stopped reaching out to workers and workers turned away from unions. But here Lane Windham tells a different story. Highlighting the integral, often-overlooked contributions of women, people of color, young workers, and southerners, Windham reveals how in the 1970s workers combined old working-class tools–like unions and labor law–with legislative gains from the civil and women’s rights movements to help shore up their prospects. Through close-up studies of workers’ campaigns in shipbuilding, textiles, retail, and service, Windham overturns widely held myths about labor’s decline, showing instead how employers united to manipulate weak labor law and quash a new wave of worker organizing.

Recounting how employees attempted to unionize against overwhelming odds, Knocking on Labor’s Doordramatically refashions the narrative of working-class struggle during a crucial decade and shakes up current debates about labor’s future. Windham’s story inspires both hope and indignation, and will become a must-read in labor, civil rights, and women’s history.

Silk Stockings and Socialism: Philadelphia’s Radical Hosiery Workers from the Jazz Age to the New Deal (2017)

The 1920s Jazz Age is remembered for flappers and speakeasies, not for the success of a declining labor movement. A more complex story was unfolding among the young women and men in the hosiery mills of Kensington, the working-class heart of Philadelphia. Their product was silk stockings, the iconic fashion item of the flapper culture then sweeping America and the world. Although the young people who flooded into this booming industry were avid participants in Jazz Age culture, they also embraced a surprising, rights-based labor movement, headed by the socialist-led American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers (AFFFHW).

In this first history of this remarkable union, Sharon McConnell-Sidorick reveals how activists ingeniously fused youth culture and radical politics to build a subculture that included dances and parties as well as picket lines and sit-down strikes, while forging a vision for social change. In documenting AFFFHW members and the Kensington community, McConnell-Sidorick shows how labor federations like the Congress of Industrial Organizations and government programs like the New Deal did not spring from the heads of union leaders or policy experts but were instead nurtured by grassroots social movements across America.

Unraveling the Garment Industry (2007)

Unraveling the Garment Industry investigates the politics of labor and protest within the garment industry. Focusing on three labor rights movements—against GAP clothing in El Salvador, child labor in Bangladesh, and sweatshops in New York City—Ethel C. Brooks examines how transnational consumer protest campaigns effect change, sometimes with unplanned penalties for those they intend to protect.

Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980 (1992)

Virtually ignored by labor historians are the black and white women in South African industries. Drawing on comparative labor history and feminist theory, this important study traces the history of women as industrial workers and trade unionists in South Africa during most of the twentieth century.

Like Night and Day: Unionization in a Southern Mill Town (1997)

Daniel Clark demonstrates the dramatic impact unionization made on the lives of textile workers in Henderson, North Carolina, in the decade after World War II. Focusing on the Harriet and Henderson Cotton Mills, he shows that workers valued the Textile Workers Union of America for more than the higher wages and improved benefits it secured for them. Specifically, Clark points to the importance members placed on union-instituted grievance and arbitration procedures, which most labor historians have seen as impediments rather than improvements.

From the signing of contracts in 1943 until a devastating strike fifteen years later, the union gave local workers the tools they needed to secure at least some measure of workplace autonomy and respect from their employer. Union-instituted grievance procedures were not without flaws, says Clark, but they were the linchpin of these efforts. When arbitration and grievance agreements collapsed in 1958, the result was the strike that ultimately broke the union. Based on complete access to company archives and transcripts of grievance hearings, this case study recasts our understanding of labor-management relations in the postwar South.

What Do We Need a Union For? The TWUA in the South, 1945-1955 (1997)

The rise in standards of living throughout the U. S. in the wake of World War II brought significant changes to the lives of southern textile workers. Mill workers’ wages rose, their purchasing power grew, and their economic expectations increased–with little help from the unions. Timothy Minchin argues that the reasons behind the failure of textile unions in the postwar South lie not in stereotypical assumptions of mill workers’ passivity or anti-union hostility but in these large-scale social changes. Minchin addresses the challenges faced by the TWUA–competition from nonunion mills that matched or exceeded union wages, charges of racism and radicalism within the union, and conflict between its northern and southern branches–and focuses especially on the devastating general strike of 1951. Drawing extensively on oral histories and archival records, he presents a close look at southern textile communities within the context of the larger history of southern labor, linking events in the textile industry to the broader social and economic impact of World War II on American society.