Sweatshop

From Free net encyclopedia

(Redirected from Sweatshops)

A sweatshop is a factory in which people often work for a very small wage or doing piece work. Typically workers there are producing clothes, toys, shoes, electronics or other consumer goods.

The term is usually used as a pejorative, and connotes the condition of a factory or place in which the workers may be kept in a harsh environment with inadequate ventilation, and may sometimes be abused physically, mentally, subjected to long hours, harsh or unsafe conditions, and the like. Some companies have been found to use children in their subcontracting sweatshops. Some countries where sweatshops are found forbid the practice of trade unionization.

Some sweatshops persist in manufacturing enclaves in the United States and other developed countries -- for example, the garment manufacturing sector in New York and Los Angeles. Although the rapid gentrification of New York City has taken over areas once synonymous with sweatshops, the history is taught and remembered in the Lower East Side's Tenement Museum. Conditions in a typical historical sweatshop included gas lighting, little or no windows, wooden stairs, smoking while working, rat infestations, and sometimes people's apartments were sweatshops. With these factors in mind, it's not hard to imagine how the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was started. So you have the daily house routine going on at the same time as the production. This includes meat factories. There were no laws of sanitation or knowledge of foodborne illnesses until outbreaks of cholera became a pandemic in the Victorian Era. However, the Meat Inspection Act was not passed until 1906, Upton Sinclair's graphic details of the meat packing industry in his novel The Jungle contributed to the concern. If it wasn't that then it was food poisoning, which was experienced by the average citizen as a result of purchasing the diseased meat.

1 Sweatshops and slavery
2 Defenses of sweatshops
- 2.1 The free-market defense
- 2.2 The non-intervention defense
3 Anti-sweatshop movement
4 Pro-sweatshop movement
5 Results
6 See also
7 References
- 7.1 Notes
8 External links

[edit]

Sweatshops and slavery

Since antiquity, slave factories have existed in many economies. After the suppression of most chattel slavery in the 19th century, sweatshops became the most prominent of several fronts on which anti-slavery forces were divided. Depending on definitional questions, and the level of coercion or informed consent in specific instances, some sweatshops may or may not be considered slave economies. This question was regularly debated by abolitionists and later by the League of Nations' and the United Nations' various working groups on slavery. In general, these groups were unable to agree on a satisfactory definition of slavery, and focused their efforts on human trafficking instead.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

[edit]

Defenses of sweatshops

[edit]

The free-market defense

Those who defend the practice of moving production to low-wage facilities overseas point to a lower standard of living as an explanation for the low wages, and argue that their operations benefit the community by providing needed jobs. These defenders often point out that the choice isn't between high-paid and low-paid work, but between low-paid work or unemployment. In response to voluntary efforts to raise wages in sweatshops such as the Fair Olympics movement, some people argue that despite how harsh the conditions in the sweatshops are and how little these workers make, the people who work in sweatshops do so willingly because their alternatives, like agriculture and prostitution, are even worse. Thus, they say, it would make more sense to buy the cheaper, sweatshop-made clothing, which benefits the workers in parts of the world where even low wages are sorely needed, and give the surplus money to simple charity, where the money is used to help the people who are even worse off than the sweatshop employees.

In response, opponents of sweatshops argue that corporations that sell their products in wealthy western countries at western prices and at high profit margins have a responsibility to pay their workers according to basic western standards. For example, in 2003, Honduran factory workers were paid only 15 cents to make a Sean John t-shirt that cost its U.S. bulk importer $3.65 and retailed for $40.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> They also point out the irony that sweatshop workers don't earn enough money to buy the products that they make, which are often commonplace items such as t-shirts, shoes, or toys. (Nonsweatshop employees at a company such as Boeing cannot afford to buy the products that they make, either, but comparing jumbo jets to sneakers would be beside the point, except that it illustrates the reductio ad absurdum fallacy in this line of argument.) Another argument is that the "free market" system, which allows transnational companies to establish factories wherever they wish without allowing workers to work wherever they wish, is partly responsible for destroying the agricultural economies which formerly employed workers in poor countries. Thus, the economic mechanism which creates sweatshops is the same that eliminates alternative employment. Finally, opponents of sweatshops argue that the mere fact that workers are desperate does not justify the exploitation of their desperation: "Just because people need jobs," Bob Jeffcott of the Maquila Solidarity Network has said, "doesn't mean they deserve to be exploited."

[edit]

The non-intervention defense

Some defenders of sweatshops hold that even products manufactured as a result of child labor should not be boycotted. According to a UNICEF study an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 Nepalese children turned to prostitution after the US banned that country's carpet exports in the 1990s. Also, after the Child Labor Deterrence Act was introduced in the US, an estimated 50,000 children were dismissed from their garment industry jobs in Bangladesh, leaving many to resort to jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution," – "all of them more hazardous and exploitative than garment production" according to the UNICEF study.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Again, in response, opponents of sweatshops insist that one exploitative practice cannot be defended by arguing that the alternative is worse - for example, in their view, one cannot justify slavery by claiming that some people would starve if they were not enslaved. Rather than promoting the "lesser evil", they appeal to the conscience of the owners of corporations, feeling should treat their employees with a degree of decency. However, since nobody is defending slavery, this argument is only relevant to sweatshops whose practices are universally condemned, such as Chinese prison camps or Cuban sugar farms, not to those places where the pay conditions are only bad in relation to western factories, such as Nepalese carpet factories.

[edit]

Anti-sweatshop movement

Concern over the appalling conditions of workers was exposed by the muckrakers during the late 19th/early 20th centuries. The Progressive Era in the United States saw the beginning of the first attention to and passing of labor laws, which would regulate unethical work force policies. The United Kingdom passed the Factory Act in the 19th century and continued to add to it to help quell the unfair procedures. These regulations helped to give rise and power to labor unions. Sweatshops have still proved a difficult issue to solve because its roots lie in the conceptual foundations of the world economy, and corporations continue to move business overseas, especially in China. Thus, sweatshop labour has become a focus of the anti-globalization movement, which has accused many companies (such as the Walt Disney Company, The Gap, and Nike) of using sweatshops. The movement charges that the process of neoliberal globalization has made it difficult to stem corporate abuses of sweatshop workers. Furthermore, they argue that lower-wage production in other countries is responsible for a loss of jobs in first-world countries and that there tends to be a race to the bottom as multinationals leap from one low-wage country to another in a quest for the cheapest production costs. This movement has found a stronghold in middle-class America as well as on college campuses in groups such as United Students Against Sweatshops.

Labor unions, such as the AFL-CIO, have helped support the anti-sweatshop movement both out of a genuine concern for the welfare of people in the developing world and out of self-interest. Since the labor costs of products produced overseas are often cheaper relative to products produced by American or European workers, unions worry about the cheaper products that potentially put their members out of work through plant closings and, carried to an extreme, the destruction of a domestic industry. For example, the American labor union UNITE HERE, which represents garment workers, has only approximately 3,000 garment workers remaining in its base, limited especially by the changes in US sweatshops from large factories to small, disconnected workspaces.

Critics of sweatshops have also focused on the negative environmental and health impacts on workers, the local community, as well as large surrounding areas affected by industrial wastes often resulting in increased rates of birth defects.

[edit]

Pro-sweatshop movement

Jeffrey Sachs, an adviser to developing nations and an economist, says "My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops, but that there are too few," in Allen R. Meyerson's "In Principle, A Case for More 'Sweatshops'", The New York Times, June 22, 1997, p E5. A few prominent liberals, too, have championed sweatshops, most notably New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

The justification for sweatshops usually runs along these lines: although working conditions may appear to be substandard from the perspective of a privileged American, they are actually improvements over what their employees lives had been like before the sweatshop was opened. The proof of this, say pro-sweatshop partisans, is that if sweatshop jobs did not improve their workers' lives, those workers would not have taken the jobs.

[edit]

Results

Some companies have bowed to public pressure to reduce or end their use of sweatshop labour. (Such firms often publicize the fact that their products are not made with sweatshop labour; a number of organizations publish lists of companies that pay their workers a living wage.)

New Balance, for instance, is notable for changing its policies after intense pressure from campus anti-sweatshop groups. The Gap, also, has been changing its policies. Old Navy and Banana Republic, on the other hand, have not significantly changed their methods, and Walmart and Nike are two of the largest corporate sponsors of sweatshop labor.

The World Bank estimates that today, 1/5th of human beings live under the international poverty line.<ref name="berk">Template:Cite journal</ref> This percentage is better than it has probably ever been in history. World poverty has gotten better due in a large part to the economic success of China and India. With this success, one should also note that economic inequality has never been so large.

"The income gap between the fifth of the world's people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 74 to 1 in 1997, up from 60 to 1 in 1990 and 30 to 1 in 1960. Earlier the income gap between the top and bottom countries increased from 3 to 1 in 1820 to 7 to 1 in 1870 to 11 to 1 in 1913."<ref name="berk"/>

Whether sweatshops have exacerbated the inequality, or raised living standards, remains an open question; it is possible that they have done both.

[edit]