From the first usage in nineteenth-century America of the term “sweatshop,” the definition of this emotive term has “reflected social anxiety about global flows and exchange of people, goods, culture, and capital,” Bender and Greenwald write in their useful edited volume, Sweatshops USA. And if the term sweatshop today connotes a race to the bottom in which a market structure of intense competition reflects the absence, or lack of the enforcement of, effective protective legislation across the relevant market, then there is little basically new in the organization of garment production and the unrelenting pressures on its workers. Essential characteristics of sweated labor in the industry result from structural characteristics which have remained and are only ameliorated by strong unions, public concern for the conditions of labor, and enforced social regulation. While it has often seemed to be an outlier in its exploitative norms, the idea that garment work is totally unique in the flexibility it demands, the excesses and abuses inherent in the contracting system with its pressures to respond to unpredictable and rapidly changing fashion, its production of a labor-intensive product not easily mechanized, and its ability to seek out and control a vulnerable labor force is a misjudgment. It is rather an industry which represents an extreme but not a different form of the way labor markets operate. It is not a vanishing past but a worrisome globalized future of just-in-time production and multisourced internationalized commodity chain organization of production which should be worrying.