The Twilight of the Sweatshop Age: Labor, Monopsony and Supply Chains with Ashok Kumar
Cosmopod · Cosmonaut Magazine
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Show Notes
Rudy joins Ashok Kumar author of Monopsony Capitalism: Power and Production in the Twilight of the Sweatshop Age for a discussion on global sweatshops, labor and commodity chains. We start off by comparing the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1912 and the Rana Plaza disaster of 2013, and explaining what has changed and what has stayed the same. We talk about the particular role of the textile industry in capitalism, how it changed under globalization and what it reveals for the capitalist system focusing on the topic of monopsony, i.e. single buyer markets. We discuss the position of labor in the textile industry, how it has shaped global supply chains, and what types of organizing have won concessions from capital in the past and present.