Similar conditions prevail in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines -- countries, in other words, whose names adorn the labels of the shirts, jeans and shoes you're probably wearing while reading this review.
What makes this book additionally persuasive is that the author is able to take a long historical view. She compares, for instance, wages and conditions in Asia now with those in the US 100 and even 200 years ago. She looks at how these were improved by hard struggle, and how such wages and conditions are nowadays illegal (unless, of course, the workers are themselves illegal immigrants, in which case no rules apply because appeal for legal protection is impossible).
How does Taiwan fit into this picture? It generally appears alongside places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore where better conditions prevail. Even so, I interviewed a Filipino contract-worker who made computer parts recently, and he told me that his monthly pay was NT$15,840, of which two-thirds disappeared in payments to his Taiwan agent, payments to his agent in the Philippines (US$744 before he can even come here), fines for "defective products," and withholding tax that he may find hard to get back once he's out of the country.
The point here is that all these workers are human beings with human talents. Some will be musical, others perhaps with a mathematical skill, and all have families, lovers, and so on. Yet these industries, like so many others, treat them essentially as robots, and their individual talents go into hiding. They are diminished as people.
Making Sweatshops makes grim reading, but it's not in any way fanatical. In fact, Rosen is remarkably, even surprisingly, reasonable. She writes, for instance, that producing more good-quality clothing more cheaply is a desirable objective in itself. But she also believes the American public would be willing to pay slightly more for its clothes if it knew of the terrible conditions so many are currently produced in (though the effect would be slight as wages account for less than one percent of the cost of many items).
But it would be wrong to end on anything but a horrifying note. An appropriate one would be that, in 1993, the total number of workers burned alive in dormitory fires in China reached 2,500. That's something to think about while regarding yourself in the mirror in your fashionable new jeans.
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