Sweatshop

A sweatshop or sweat factory is a crowded workplace with very poor, socially unacceptable or illegal working conditions. Some illegal working conditions include poor ventilation, little to no breaks, inadequate work space, insufficient lighting, or uncomfortably/dangerously high or low temperatures. The work may be difficult, tiresome, dangerous, climatically challenging or underpaid. Workers in sweatshops may work long hours with unfair wages, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage; child labor laws may also be violated. 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. 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. The U.S. Department of Labor's "2015 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor" found that "18 countries did not meet the International Labour Organization's recommendation for an adequate number of inspectors."

Use of the term

The phrase sweatshop was coined in 1850, meaning a factory or workshop where workers are treated unfairly, for example having low wages, working long hours, and in poor conditions. Since 1850, immigrants have been flocking to work at sweatshops in cities like London and New York for more than one century. Many of them worked in tiny, stuffy rooms that are prone to fire hazards and rat infestations. The term sweatshop was used in Charles Kingsley's ''Cheap Clothes and Nasty'' (1850) describing such workplaces create a ‘sweating system’ of workers. The idea of minimum wage and Labour's union was not developed until the 1890s. This issue appears to be solved by some anti-sweatshop organizations. However, the ongoing development of the issue is showing a different situation.The phrase is still used in current times due to the fact that it is still used in a variety of countries around the world.

History

19th and early 20th centuries

Many workplaces through history have been crowded, low-paying and without job security; but the concept of a sweatshop originated between 1830 and 1850 as a specific type of workshop in which a certain type of middleman, the ''sweater'', directed others in garment making (the process of producing clothing) under arduous 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. The workplaces created for the sweating system (a system of subcontracting in the tailoring trade) were called ''sweatshops'' and might contain only a few workers or as many as 300 and more.

Between 1832 and 1850, sweatshops attracted individuals with lower income to growing cities, and attracted immigrants to locations such as London and New York City's garment district, located near the tenements of New York's Lower East Side. These sweatshops incurred criticism: labor leaders cited them as crowded, poorly ventilated, and prone to fires and rodent infestations: in many cases, there were many workers crowded into small tenement rooms.

In the 1890s, a group calling itself the National Anti-Sweating League was formed in Melbourne and campaigned successfully for a minimum wage via trade boards. A group with the same name campaigned from 1906 in the UK, resulting in the Trade Boards Act 1909.

In 1910, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union was founded in attempt to improve the condition of these workers.

Criticism of garment sweatshops became a major force behind workplace safety regulation and labor laws. As some journalists strove to change working conditions, the term ''sweatshop'' came to refer to a broader set of workplaces whose conditions were considered inferior. In the United States, investigative journalists, known as muckrakers, wrote exposés of business practices, and progressive politicians campaigned for new laws. 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.

In 1911, negative public perceptions of sweatshops were galvanized by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City. The pivotal role of this time and place is chronicled at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, part of the Lower East Side Tenement National Historic Site. While trade unions, minimum wage laws, fire safety codes, and labour laws have made sweatshops (in the original sense) rarer in the developed world, they did not eliminate them, and the term is increasingly associated with factories in the developing world.

Late 20th century to present

In a report issued in 1994, the United States Government Accountability Office found that there were still thousands of sweatshops in the United States, using a definition of a ''sweatshop'' as any "employer that violates more than one federal or state labor law governing minimum wage and overtime, child labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers' compensation, or industry registration". This recent definition eliminates any historical distinction about the role of a middleman or the items produced, and focuses on the legal standards of developed country workplaces. An area of controversy between supporters of outsourcing production to the Third World and the anti-sweatshop movement is whether such standards can or should be applied to the workplaces of the developing world.

Sweatshops are also sometimes implicated in human trafficking when workers have been tricked into starting work without informed consent, or when workers are kept at work through debt bondage or mental duress, all of which are more likely if the workforce is drawn from children or the uneducated rural poor. 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. Penal labor facilities (employing prisoners) may be grouped under the sweatshop label due to underpaid work conditions.

Sweatshops conditions resemble prison labor in many cases, especially from a commonly found Western perspective. In 2014 Apple was caught "failing to protect its workers" in one of its Pegatron factories. Overwhelmed workers were caught falling asleep during their 12-hour shifts and an undercover reporter had to work 18 days in a row. Sweatshops in question carry characteristics such as compulsory pregnancy tests for female laborers and terrorization from supervisors into submission. Workers then go into a state of forced labor, and if even one day of work is not accounted for could get immediately fired. These working conditions have been the source of suicidal unrest within factories in the past. Chinese sweatshops known to have increased numbers of suicidal employees have suicide nets covering the whole site, in place to stop overworked and stressed employees leaping to their deaths, such as in the case of the Foxconn suicides.

Recently, Boohoo came under light since auditors uncovered large chain of factories in Leicester producing clothes for Boohoo were only paying their workers between £3-4. The conditions of the factories were described as terrible and workers received "illegally low pay".

Child Labor: American History

Cotton is one of the most important and widely produced crops in the world. However, cotton textiles became the major battlefield on which the political, social, and economic war over child labour was fought. According to the book ''Child Labor: An American History'' by Hugh D. Hindman, states, "In 1870, when New England dominated textiles, 13,767, or 14.5 percent of its workforce was children under sixteen". By the most conservative estimate, from the Census of Manufacturers, there were 27,538 under sixteen in southern mills. According to the household census in 1900, the number was 60,000. In response to the issue of child labor, The United States enacted the Fair Labor Standards Acts of 1938 (FLSA) to prohibit the employment of minors under the age of sixteen.

Industries using sweatshop labor

World-famous fashion brands such as H&M, Nike, Adidas and Uniqlo have all been criticized for their use of sweatshops. In 2015, anti-sweatshops protesters marched against the Japanese fast-fashion brand Uniqlo in Hong Kong. Along with the Japanese anti-sweatshops organisation Human Rights Now!, the Hong Kong labour organisation SACOM (Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour) protested the "harsh and dangerous" working conditions in Uniqlo's value-added factories in China. According to a recent report published by SACOM, Uniqlo’s suppliers were blamed for "systematically underpaying their labour, forcing them to work excessive hours and subjecting them to unsafe working conditions, which included sewage-covered floors, poor ventilation, and sweltering temperatures". According to the 2016 Clean Clothes Campaign, H&M strategic suppliers in Bangladesh were reported for dangerous working environments, which lacked vital equipment for workers and adequate fire exits.

The German sportswear giant Adidas was criticized for its Indonesian sweatshops in 2000, and accused of underpayment, overtime working, physical abuse and child labour. 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". Since the 1990s, Nike was reported to employ sweat factories and child labour. Regardless of its effort to turn things around, Nike's image has been affected by the issue during the past two decades. Nike established an independent department which aimed to improve workers’ livelihoods in 1996. It was renamed the Fair Labor Association in 1999, as a non-profit organisation which includes representatives from companies, human rights organizations, and labour unions to work on the monitoring and management of labour rights. To improve its brand image of being immoral, Nike has been publishing annual sustainable business reports since 2001 and annual corporate social responsibility reports continuously since 2005, mentioning its commitments, standards and audits. Similar stories are still heard in the fashion industry in the past decades. In 2022, brands such as Gap, Disney, Victoria's Secret, Aeropostale to name a few examples, are still using sweatshops.

In 2016, the United States Department of Labor investigated 77 garment factories in Los Angeles that produced clothing for the aforementioned brands, and found labor violations at 85% of the factories it visited.

Contributing factors

Fast fashion

A trend called "fast fashion" has contributed to the rise of sweatshops. Fast fashion refers to "rapid reorders and new orders that retailers now exert as they discern sales trends in real time" (Ross, 2015) To catch up with the fast-changing fashion trends to satisfy increasing customers’ demand, these fast-fashion brands have to react and arrange production accordingly. To lower production and the storage cost, these brands outsource labour to other countries with low production costs which can produce orders in a short period of time. This results in workers suffering from unreasonably long working hours without reasonable payment. A documentary, "The True Cost" (2015), claims that sweatshops relieve pressure on retailers by passing it to factory owners and, ultimately, workers.

Government corruption and inadequate labour protection legislation

Government corruption and inadequate labour protection legislation in developing countries have also contributed to the suffering of their employees. Weak law enforcement has attracted outside investment in these developing countries, which is a serious problem generating sweatshops. Without reasonable law restrictions, outside investors are able to set up fashion manufacturing plants at a lower cost. According to Zamen (2012), governments in the developing countries often fail to enforce safety standards in local factories because of corruption and weak law enforcement. These weaknesses allow factories to provide dangerous working conditions for their workers. With reference to the Corruption Perception Index 2016 (2017), those countries with high risk of corruption such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Pakistan and China are reported to have larger numbers of unsafe garments factories operating inside the countries. When Zamen (2012) said "corruption kills", sweatshops in developing countries would be the prime cases.

In some places the government or media do not show the full picture. For example, labour camps in Dubai do not have proper conditions for workers. If they protest, they can be deported if they are foreigners.

Low education level

It is suggested that these workers should fight back and protect their own labour rights, yet a lot of them in developing countries are ignorant about their own rights because of low education level. According to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (2016), most of these sweatshops are located in countries that have low education levels. Harrison, A. & Scorse, J. (2004) mentions that most of the workers do not know about their rights, such as matters about wages and supposed working conditions, thus they have no skill set to fight for their labour rights through collective bargain (such as strike or work to rule). Their lack of knowledge makes it hard for them to improve working conditions on their own.

Impacts of sweatshops

Child labour

Child labour is one of the most serious impacts that sweatshops have brought. According to the International Labour Office, more than 250 million children are employed in sweatshops, of which 170 million of them are engaged in textiles and garments industry in developing countries. In hopes of earning a living, many girls in these countries, such as Bangladesh and India, are willing to work at low wages for long working hours, said Sofie Ovaa, an officer of Stop Child Labour. Most fashion manufacturing chains employ low-skilled labour and as child labour are easier to manage and even more suitable than adult labour for certain jobs such as cotton picking, it becomes a particular problem in sweatshops as they are vulnerable with no backups.

Environmental pollution

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. Clothing manufacturing is still one of the most polluting industries in the world. Nevertheless, the environment of developing countries remained deeply polluted by the untreated waste. The Buriganga River in Bangladesh is now black in colour and pronounced biologically dead because neighbouring leather tanneries are discharging more than 150 cubics of liquid waste daily. (Stanko, 2013) The daily life of local people is significantly affected as Buriganga River is their source of bathing, irrigation and transportation. Many workers in the tanneries suffer from serious skin illness since they are exposed to toxic chemicals for long period of time. Air is being highly polluted in such area because the factories do not install proper ventilation facilities. Sweatshops is also an environmental issue as it is not only causing harm to the human right of labour but also their living environment.

Anti-sweatshop movement

History

19th and early 20th centuries

Some of the earliest sweatshop critics were found in the 19th century abolitionist movement that had originally coalesced in opposition to chattel slavery, and many abolitionists saw similarities between slavery and sweatshop work. As slavery was successively outlawed in industrial countries between 1794 (in France) and 1865 (in the United States), some abolitionists sought to broaden the anti-slavery consensus to include other forms of harsh labor, including sweatshops. As it happened, the first significant law to address sweatshops (the Factory Act of 1833) was passed in the United Kingdom several years after the slave trade (1807) and ownership of slaves (1833) were made illegal.

Ultimately, the abolitionist movement split apart. Some advocates focused on working conditions and found common cause with trade unions and Marxists and socialist political groups, or progressive movement and the muckrakers. Others focused on the continued slave trade and involuntary servitude in the colonial world. For those groups that remained focused on slavery, sweatshops became one of the primary objects of controversy. Workplaces across multiple sectors of the economy were categorized as sweatshops. However, there were fundamental philosophical disagreements about what constituted slavery. Unable to agree on the status of sweatshops, the abolitionists working with the League of Nations and the United Nations ultimately backed away from efforts to define slavery, and focused instead on a common precursor of slavery – human trafficking.

Those focused on working conditions included Friedrich Engels