Monitoring Sweatshops

Monitoring Sweatshops offers the first comprehensive assessment of sweatshop monitoring. Within, readers will learn of the government's efforts to persuade retailers and clothing companies to monitor themselves with the use of private monitors. The author shows the different approaches firms have taken, and the range of monitors chosen, from the big accounting companies to local non-profits. Readers will also see how the efforts of the anti-sweatshop movement forced these companies to do the same overseas. When monitoring is understood as the result of the withdrawal of governments from enforcing labor standards as well as the weakening of labor unions, it becomes clear that we are experiencing a shift from a social contract between workers, businesses and government to one that Esbenshade calls the social responsibility contract. considerable attention to the most thorough of the Department of Labor's programs, the one in Los Angeles. Readers are also guided through the maze of alternative approaches to deciding the questions of what should be monitored (and by who) that are being tried in workplaces throughout the world.