Sweatshop
A sweatshop or sweat factory is a cramped workplace with very poor and/or illegal working conditions, including little to no breaks, inadequate work space, insufficient lighting and ventilation, or uncomfortably or dangerously high or low temperatures. The work may be difficult, tiresome, dangerous, climatically challenging, or underpaid. Employees 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 United States. 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, by having low wages, working long hours, and living in poor conditions. Since 1850, immigrants flocked to work at sweatshops in cities like London, New York, and Paris for over a century. Many of them worked in tiny, stuffy rooms that were prone to fire hazards and rat infestations. The term sweatshop was used in Charles Kingsley's Cheap Clothes and Nasty describing how such workplaces create a ‘sweating system’ of workers. The idea of minimum wage and labour unions was not developed until the 1890s. This issue appears to be solved by some anti-sweatshop organizations. However, the phrase is still used because sweatshops are still common in 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 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 were called sweatshops and might contain only a few workers or as many as 300 or more. All those workers were illegally underpaid in terms of regular time and even overtime.Between 1832 and 1850, sweatshops attracted individuals with lower incomes 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, 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 regulations 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.
File:Millville, New Jersey - Dresses. Second view of the Western Dress Factory. Emphasis on general conditions in the... - NARA - 518630.jpg|thumb|Lewis Hine noted poor working conditions when he photographed workers at the Western Dress Factory in Millville, New Jersey, for the WPA's National Research Project
In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire galvanized negative public perceptions of sweatshops in New York City. The pivotal role of this event 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 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 1994, the United States Government Accountability Office reported 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 may be grouped under the sweatshop label due to underpaid work conditions.
Sweatshop 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 they could be 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 from leaping to their deaths, such as in the case of the Foxconn suicides.
Recently, Boohoo came under light since auditors uncovered a large chain of factories in Leicester producing clothes for Boohoo that were only paying their workers between £3-4. The conditions of the factories were described as terrible and workers received "illegally low pay".
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-sweatshop protesters marched against the Japanese fast-fashion brand Uniqlo in Hong Kong. Along with the Japanese anti-sweatshops organisation, the Hong Kong labour organisation SACOM 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 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 has been 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 have been common in the fashion industry over the past few decades. Brands such as Shein, Nike, H&M, Zara, Disney, and Victoria's Secret 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.