Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry
Ellen Israel Rosen. University of California Press, 2002. ISBN: 0-520-23337-9
Recommended by Keith Yearman

It is predicted, with the expiration of the global textile quota system on January 1, 2005, that many Latin American states will "fall off the cliff." Quoted in a National Labor Committee report, Alfonso Hernandez (of the textile manufacturer Argus International, “estimates that 475 factories throughout Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico have shut down in just the last two years, and others have been consolidated….[he] speculates that…just six or seven major factories will be left standing in Central America as serious players.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, "Even optimists concede that about half of the 500,000 jobs at the region's 1,000 garment companies could vanish in the next five years” (June 16, 2004). Rosen's book is critical to understanding how Latin America became so reliant upon apparel and textile manufacturing (and the neoliberal imposition of this economic activity), and how these jobs are heading to China, never to return.