Sweatshop
Women make up 85 to 90% of sweatshop workers and may be forced by employers to take birth control and routine pregnancy tests to avoid supporting maternity leave or providing health benefits.
[2] The Fair Labor Association's "2006 Annual Public Report" inspected factories for FLA compliance in 18 countries including Bangladesh, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Malaysia, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, China, India, Vietnam, Honduras, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and the US.
"[4] The phrase sweatshop was coined in 1850, meaning a factory or workshop where workers are treated unfairly, for example, by having low wages, working long hours, and living in poor conditions.
The terms sweater for the middleman and sweat system for the process of subcontracting piecework were used in early critiques like Charles Kingsley's Cheap Clothes and Nasty, written in 1850, which described conditions in London, England.
Notable exposés of sweatshop conditions include Jacob Riis' photo documentary How the Other Half Lives and Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, a fictionalized account of the meat packing industry.
[citation needed] Because they often exist in places without effective workplace safety or environmental laws, sweatshops sometimes injure their workers or the environment at greater rates than would be acceptable in developed countries.
[18] According to the 2016 Clean Clothes Campaign,[19] H&M strategic suppliers in Bangladesh were reported for dangerous working environments, which lacked vital equipment for workers and adequate fire exits.
[20] Another sportswear giant, Nike, faced a heavy wave of anti-sweatshop protests, organised by the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and held in Boston, Washington D.C., Bangalore, and San Pedro Sula.
They claimed that workers in Nike's contract factory in Vietnam were suffering from wage theft, verbal abuse and harsh working conditions with "temperatures over the legal limit of 90 degrees".
Sama, an "ethical AI" company outsourced work to Kenya where workers were tasked to watch videos of murdeers, rapes, suicides, and child sexual abuse.
In the United States, sweatshops supporting the cotton textile industry were a contentious topic in American economic and political debate surrounding the use of child labor.
In his book Child Labor: An American History, Hugh D. Hindman stated, "In 1870, when New England dominated textiles, 13,767, or 14.5 percent of its workforce was children under sixteen".
[41] To curb this matter, the United States enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) to prohibit the employment of minors under the age of sixteen.
[42] Not only workers are impacted by sweatshops, but the neighboring environment as well, through lax environmental laws set up in developing countries to help reduce the production cost of the fashion industry.
The Buriganga River in Bangladesh is now black and pronounced biologically dead because neighbouring leather tanneries are discharging more than 150 cubics of liquid waste daily.
Some advocates focused on working conditions and found common causes with trade unions Marxists and socialist political groups, or progressive movement and the muckrakers.
Concern over working conditions as described by muckraker journalists during the Progressive Era in the United States saw the passage of new workers' rights laws and ultimately resulted in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, passed during the New Deal.
[citation needed] Clothing and footwear factories overseas have progressively improved working conditions because of the high demand of anti-sweatshop movement labor rights advocates.
Labour advocates say this could be a major turning point after 4 decades of workers in Asia and Latin American factories being underpaid, underappreciated and working in an unsafe environment.
[48] As well as these governments also enforced stricter labor laws in 2013 after the collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, a large 5 storied sweatshop that killed 1135 people due to the building not being up to code, Bangladeshi police shut down many other factories after safety checks were completed and not met.
However, social media isn’t just helping to expose brands who are using sweatshops and unethical production practices but also is allowing companies that are trying to increase awareness of the anti-sweatshop movement to spread their message quickly and efficiently.
[51] Sweatshop-free is a term the fashion brand American Apparel created to mean coercion-free, fair compensation for garment workers who make their products.
[61] Social critics complain that sweatshop workers often do not earn enough money to buy the products that they make, even though such items are often commonplace goods such as T-shirts, shoes, and toys.
In 2003, Honduran garment factory workers were paid US$0.24 for each $50 Sean John sweatshirt, $0.15 for each long-sleeved T-shirt, and only five cents for each short-sleeved shirt – less than one-half of one percent of the retail price.
[74][75] Éric Toussaint claims that quality of life in developing countries was actually higher between 1945 and 1980 before the international debt crisis of 1982 harmed economies in developing countries causing them to turn to IMF and World Bank-organized "structural adjustments"[76] and that unionized jobs pay more than sweatshop ones overall – "several studies of workers producing for US firms in Mexico are instructive: workers at the Aluminum Company of America's Ciudad Acuna plant earn between $21.44 and $24.60 per week, but a weekly basket of basic food items costs $26.87.
[85][86][failed verification] As Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman states in a 1997 article for Slate, "as manufacturing grows in poor countries, it creates a ripple effect that benefits ordinary people: 'The pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise.'
"[87] Writer Johan Norberg, a proponent of market economics, points out an irony:[88] [Sweatshop critics] say that we shouldn't buy from countries like Vietnam because of its labor standards, they've got it all wrong.
These countries won't get rich without being able to export goods.Heavy-handed responses to reports of child labor and worker rights abuses such as widespread boycotts can be counterproductive if the net effect is simply to eliminate contracts with suppliers rather than to reform their employment practices.
However, during this new industrialized economy, the labor movement drove the rise in the average level of income as factory workers began to demand better wages and working conditions.
For example, in Bangladesh, a country with one of the lowest minimum wages in the world, of $68 per month,[97] the Rana Plaza a known sweatshop that hosted garment factories for retailers such as Primark, JC Penney, Joe Fresh and Benetton,[98] collapsed as it was visibly not structurally sound.
