Fashion production exemplifies the flexibilities and harms of globalized labor

Evidence

In more recent times, fashion once again becomes the case study of choice through which to demonstrate the new vagaries of the global economy. No longer the archetypal product of economic development and expansion, fashion instead becomes the disparate industry which typifies the nature of work in a new international order. The production of fashion items has spanned the globe for some time, as already discussed - however, something about the structure of fashion production lends itself to exemplifying the unhappy flexibilities of globalized labor. Here we have an industry which still manufactures, but nothing heavy and very differently. The various innovations of outsourcing, homeworking, moving production to cheaper labor, replacing all employment with a fiction of self-employment with the accompanying deterioration in working conditions and lengthening of the ever-flexible working day, not to mention the feminized workforce which continued to work when men could not - all of these characteristics make the fashion industry good business for sociologists of the global. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2854