Sweatshops

Waging War with Our Wallets: The Key to Saving the Underpaid and Overworked Sweatshop workers are without a doubt some of the most overworked and underpaid employees. With inhumane, unhygienic work areas and demanding, cruel employers, it is tantamount to modern day slavery. Unfortunately, most of these sweatshops are either located in developing countries or generally impoverished areas in the U.S., where there are not many opportunities for jobs with decent wages. This forces many people (children included) to take on these undesirable jobs in order to provide for their families. Though there are anti-sweatshop organizations dedicated to opposing and halting the usage of maltreated labor, there are too many giant and well-established corporations

When people think of a sweatshop, images of people assembling items in a hot and crowded factory somewhere in a “Third World” country tend to come to mind. However, the first few sweatshops were located in both New York and England, becoming established in the late 1800’s. The term “sweatshop” originated from the term “sweating”, which described the contractual agreements between workers and designers to produce clothing. In these workshops, there was a “sweater”, an individual who monitored garment making (“Origins Of Sweatshops”, 2017). The term sweatshop is more so currently used to describe the working conditions rather than the type of workplace itself. Even back then, these workplaces were unsanitary, were sources of safety hazards and extremely crowded. Throughout the years, poor people and immigrants filled up the sweatshops in desperate search for work. This eventually spread beyond the United States and U.K., and became a commonplace practice in developing countries ruled by dictators. With this spread quickly came the employment of child workers, especially in places such as Indonesia, and India. Like the adults, they are subject to treatment that violates their human rights. They are left without protection from any other adults, making them more susceptible to abuse. Despite this, major corporations and brands such as Wal-Mart, Adidas, Aldo, Victoria’s Secret, Urban Outfitters and so on use sweatshops for affordable labor. One of the more prominent cases is the incident involving Kathy Lee Gifford and Wal-Mart, in which both Gifford and Wal-Mart “suffered as a result of the negative press surrounding the manufacturing of Gifford’s clothing line distributed by Wal-Mart” (Radin & Calkins). Gifford’s clothing was produced in a factory in Honduras, where female workers constantly suffered “cruel and inhumane treatment” (Radin &