BACK TO THE SWEATSHOP OR AHEAD TO THE INFORMAL SECTOR

The concept of the 'informal sector', first introduced in the early 1970s in studies of Africa, has recently gained currency as a tool for understanding the changes under way in the advanced industrial societies. This paper casts a sceptical look on this new version of the informal sector idea through a study of a critical case - the 'sweatshop' phenomenon in New York's garment industry. Whereas the literature on the informal sector argues that the return of the sweatshop exemplifies the expansion of informal activities, we contend that the sweatshop phenomenon simply isn't so. Careful scrutiny shows that there is little evidence to support the view that massive and rowing numbers of immigrants are employed in a 'rising' unregulated, informal sector. Precisely because arguments about informalization in the United States lean so heavily on the sweatshop case, the methodology developed here provides a template for other assessments of these claims.