Abstract

SweatX Closes Up Shop

The pilot manufacturing factory for SweatX, the noble anti-sweatshop brand that aspired to prove that fully unionized and even worker-owned garment factories can thrive in a sea of sweatshops, quietly closed its doors in May 2004. The small California plant, launched by the Hot Fudge venture capital fund run by Ben Cohen (co-founder of Ben & Jerry's), had struggled during its two years of operation. The basic concept was simple: Hire experienced, motivated garment workers (hardly a problem in Los Angeles, where 120,000 workers toil in thousands of tiny factories that routinely violate federal minimum-wage, health and safety laws), install them in a new plant, pay them a living wage with full health benefits, sign them up with UNITE (the garment workers' union) and educate them in the virtues of cooperative ownership. SweatX's proponents believed it would provide a model that would give anti-sweatshop activists evidence to push major labels like Gap and Nike--whose products are made primarily in Asian and Latin American sweatshops--to raise their workplace standards. SweatX could also link with human rights and labor groups like United Students Against Sweatshops (www.studentsagainstsweatshops.org) and the National Labor Committee (www.nlcnet.org), which have spent the past decade exposing sweatshop abuses and supporting workers' struggles to unionize around the world.