Sweatshop Research Paper

Sweatshop: Sweat Not!

“It’s [cheap labor] the fastest-growing criminal market in the world,” (Edmondson 149) Gail Edmondson writes in an article discussing cheap labor. Economic growth has always been a large interest for most countries. Due to many high unemployment rates, corporations take advantage of the lower classes by enforcing cheap labor. Cheap labor is the employment of people with very low wages, under poor or unsafe conditions. Since people in the lower class do not have much money, they are unable to get an education that allows them to gain a safe and well-paying career. Therefore, they turn to the cheap labor organizations that will hire thousands of untrained people at minimal costs. This practice is extremely harmful, often

Sweatshops have history and origins. Upon hearing the word “sweatshop,” one may conjure images or thoughts of conditions in an industry with laborers that are worn down and defeated. This is generally true for sweatshops. A sweatshop is defined as a factory or workshop, especially in the clothing industry, where laborers are employed to do manual work at very low wages for long hours and in poor conditions under the standards set by the United States labor departments. Sweatshops have been known to be in just about every wealthy country in the world at one point or another. Dating as far back as late eighteenth century England, sweatshops and forms of cheap labor have been affecting the lives of workers for quite some time. Sweatshops originated and first appeared in Great Britain. Speaking for historical sweatshops, workdays were extremely long, pay was beyond low, and the working conditions were unhealthy and unsafe for the workers. In the late nineteenth century, as masses of Europeans migrated to the United States, the tactics and practices of sweatshops came along with them. Since cheap labor arrived to the United States and spread all over the world, some forms of it have not yet gone away (D’Mello 27). The migrations that have taken place throughout history have contributed to the spread of cheap labor; cheap labor is now a common practice throughout the

A story shared with and published in Scholastic Scope tells about a fourteen-year-old Bangladeshi girl, Kalpona Akter. As of 2015, Kalpona was an employee of a sewing factory that payed illegal wages, hired kids under the legal working age, and had unsafe and illegal working conditions. Kalpona often struggled in her working station to keep her eyes open because she was so tired from working so many hours, and she could not catch a break. She worked with fabric that she would turn into cute clothing for children her age, but they were never clothing items that she would have the privilege of wearing. Kalpona wore just what was available to her, usually a tunic and pants with a long scarf draped over her hair. As Kalpona sewed tops and skirts, she would imagine them being worn by a teenage American girl. Kalpona was observed to have sewn eighty-three shirts in one working hour. While she was often exhausted from her hard, long hours of work, she tried to remain focused as to keep the needles from slicing her. If she were to cry out from pain, her boss would punish her (Lewis 6). Kalpona’s story and worklife are common aspects of children who work in clothing