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Exploited or Entrepreneurs?. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, April 2009, Pages: 340
Home-based workers are an ever increasing proportion
of the Australian clothing industry's workforce.
With decreasing tariff protections and increasing
cheap imports of apparel into Australia, home-based
workers offer both competitive labour costs, but most
importantly, quick turnaround times. The media and
many academic studies, focus on this supply-side
story of how home-based workers underpin a
fundamentally transforming industry. This book turns
our attention to the lives of the (mostly) migrant
women who perform this work. Focusing on a newly
collectivising group of women entrepreneurs and
employees who do industrial sewing in their homes,
this study documents a progressive policy shift
that occurred in Sydney, Australia. The work
grapples with the complexities of mounting a case for
state endorsed minimum wage and condition protections
without an over-reliance on victimhood storylines.
This analysis sheds light on a usually invisible
subject, the home-based worker, and should be of
interest to those organising in the industry,
feminist scholars, and industry policy analysts.
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