Word: sweatshops
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TIME'S Yankelovich poll underlines the point. Some 73% of the respondents believed that the computer revolution would enable more people to work at home. But only 31 % said they would prefer to do so themselves. Most work no longer involves a hay field, a coal mine or a sweatshop, but a field for social intercourse. Psychologist Abraham Maslow defined work as a hierarchy of functions: it first provides food and shelter, the basics, but then it offers security, friendship, "belongingness." This is not just a matter of trading gossip in the corridors; work itself, particularly in the information industries...
GARMENT INDUSTRY. Throughout New York City, the center of American garment manufacturing, the kind of horrid sweatshop common in the early 1900s is flourishing anew. In Chinatown lofts, Queens garages and South Bronx storefronts, workers toil from dawn until well past dark sewing pants, shirts and blouses for as little as 8? apiece. The rooms are often dimly lit and poorly ventilated. In many cases, huge rolls of cloth block fire exits. The workers range from the young to the very old. In a raid on Chinatown sweatshops last spring, federal investigators found one 90-year-old woman...
...sweatshop operators are usually immigrants who have graduated from labor to management. They take work orders from dozens of Manhattan manufacturers. The companies deny any knowledge that their garments are sewn in sweatshops, but the prices they pay-as little as $2.10 for a dress-make it obvious that the clothes were not made under legal labor conditions...
Though government officials have raided hundreds of sweatshops in recent months, they admit that they are losing the battle. Businessmen simply move from one location to another. Says California Labor Investigator Joe Razo: "We may go into the same loft building five or six times in a month and find new occupants every time." Illegal aliens rarely report their bosses for fear of being arrested and deported. Even if the sweatshop operator is caught, the penalty he receives-usually just an order to pay the back wages owed his workers-does not stop him from setting up a new operation...
Putnam protested that the 1941 rule, originally aimed at curbing sweatshop abuses, was mere federal knitpicking. It does not, for instance, ban homework in the unknitted outerwear industry. The department agreed to review the rule, and last week Putnam-along with 32 other witnesses from businesses, trade groups, unions and officials of six states-had his say at a hearing in Washington. "Cottage industry once played an honorable part in America's heritage," he declared afterward. Department officials did not say when, if ever, they might get around to changing the rule. In the meantime, Putnam's workers...