Global Sweatshops

Sweatshop labour is characterized by low wages, long hours, and systematic health and safety hazards. Most of the workers in the sweatshops of the garment industry are women, many of them migrant women. This book develops an intersectional feminist critique of the working conditions in sweatshops by analysing the role of gender, race, and migration status in bringing about and justifying the exploitation of workers on factory floors. Based on this analysis, the book argues that sweatshop workers are structurally vulnerable to exploitation in virtue of their position as gendered, racialized, and migrant workers within global supply chains. While this exploitation benefits powerful actors along global supply chains, it also creates spaces of resistance and structural transformation.

Auteur

Mirjam Müller is Assistant Professor in Feminist Philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin. Before coming to Humboldt University Berlin, she was a teaching fellow in political philosophy at King's College London, a postdoctoral fellow at the Hoover Chair at UC Leuven and a postdoctoral fellow at Justitia Amplificata at Free University Berlin.