Discussion with Sweatshop Workers

In reference to the discussion on Tuesday with the two women from the Alta Gracia in the Dominican Republic, I was underwhelmed.
For one, going off of the little bit that I do know about sweatshops and the type of exploitation that goes on in them, i didn't learn much from this discussion with these women, partly due to the set-up by the students and partly due to the lack of context that was given from the women. This may or may not be, in part, due to a language barrier, and the types of hierarchies that gives especially people of color in the Unites States context, but i certainly believe it played a factor.

I would like to have gotten more context from what exactly is happening in Alta Gracia as well as the whole of the Dominican Republic. The way the discussion was framed, with interjections and tangents on what has happened in sweatshops in China and Vietnam veered off course of the topic. I think it also homogenized the sweatshop experience as if all those who work in sweatshops have the same experiences. Oh course, they're almost all, across the board, exploited, disrespected on multiple levels, and dehumanized. But i don't think the shift in geography, national histories, and cultures are to be unacknowledged when discussing these situations. For example, from the film that we watched in class - Life + Debt - it showed the "Free Zone" in Jamaica and how that operates outside Jamaican jurisdiction and legal codes. It is a sweatshop, and the women working in them also share the process of being exploited, but it is somewhat different from other areas in which these sweatshops are "legal" in contrast to this "free zone" operating on its own, corporate legal domain.

The history of how sweatshops came to be (which is information we got from Life + Debt, that helped me to better understand the "free zones" in Jamaica) would have been helpful. Not to mention, a larger framework and discussion concerning race, gender, class, and how all those intersect and impact this situation in sweatshops would also have been helpful. Overall, i think if the department of Gender and Race studies had hosted this "event", it would have gone much more smoother, and there would have been much more to learn than simply about a good situation happening in Alta Gracia. it's great that Alta Gracia has that situation, but i think most people still need to be educated on the sweatshop situations outside Alta Gracia.