Blood Sweat

Blood, Sweat & Shears: A Closer Look At Sweatshops Essay, Research Paper

Blood, Sweat, and Shears: A Closer Look at Sweatshops

How can you tell if the product you are about to purchase was made by a child, by teenaged girls forced to work until midnight seven days a week, or in a sweatshop by workers paid 9. an hour. The sad fact is…You cannot. The companies do not want you to know, so they hide their production behind locked factory gates, barbed wire and armed guards. Many multinationals refuse to release to the American people even the list and addresses of the factories they use around the world to make the goods we purchase. The corporations say we have no right to this information. Even the President of the United States could not find out where these companies manufacture their goods. Yet, to shop with our conscience, it is our right to know in which countries and factories, under what human rights conditions, and at what wages the products we purchase are made. This paper will be a behind the scenes look at what really happens behind the closed door of sweatshops.

The terms “sweatshop” and “sweating” were first used in the 19th century to describe a subcontracting system where the middlemen earned their profit from the margin between the amount they received from a contract and the amount they paid workers. This margin was “sweated” from the workers because they received minimal wages for excessive hours worked under unsanitary conditions (Mason, 33).

This concept of sweating comes alive again in today’s garment industry which is best described as a pyramid where big-name retailers and brand-name manufacturers contract with sewing shops, who in turn hire garment workers to make the finished product. Retailers and manufacturers at the top of the pyramid dictate how much workers earn in wages by controlling the contract price given to the contractor. With these prices declining each year by as much as 25%, contractors are forced to “sweat” a profit from garment workers by working them long hours at low wages (Mason, 34).

The U.S. General Accounting Office has developed a working definition of a sweatshop as “an employer that violates more than one federal or state labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers’ compensation, or industry registration.” More broadly, a sweatshop is a workplace where workers are subject to extreme exploitation, including the absence of a living wage or benefits, poor working conditions and arbitrary discipline (Department of Labor, 2).

Despite hard-won laws for minimum wage, overtime pay, and occupational safety and health (and even government and industry pledges to crackdown) sweatshops are commonplace in the U.S. garment industry and are spreading rapidly throughout developing countries. In the U.S., garment workers typically toil 60 hours a week in front of their machines, often without minimum wage or overtime pay. In fact, the Department of Labor estimates that more than half of the country’s 22,000 sewing shops violate minimum wage and overtime laws. Many of these workers labor in dangerous conditions including blocked fire exits, unsanitary bathrooms, and poor ventilation. Government surveys reveal that 75% of U.S. garment shops violate safety and health laws. In addition, workers commonly face verbal and physical abuse and are intimidated from speaking out, fearing job loss or deportation (Department of Labor, 2).

The Department of Labor defines a work place as a sweatshop if it violates two or more of the most basic labor laws including child labor, minimum wage, overtime and fire safety laws (Department of Labor, 3). For many, the word sweatshop conjures up images of dirty, cramped, turn of the century New York tenements where immigrant women worked as seamstresses. High-rise tenement sweatshops still do exist, but, today, even large, brightly lit factories can be the sites of rampant labor abuses. Sweatshop workers report horrible working conditions including sub-minimum wages, no benefits, non-payment of wages, forced overtime, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, corporal punishment, and illegal firings. Children can often be found working in sweatshops instead of going to school. Sweatshop operators are notorious for avoiding giving maternity leave by firing pregnant women and forcing women workers to take birth control or to abort their pregnancies (Taylor, 52).

Sweatshop operators can best control a pool of workers that are ignorant of their rights as workers. Therefore, bosses often refuse to hire unionized workers and intimidate or fire any worker suspected of speaking with union representatives or trying to organize her fellow workers. In the garment industry, the typical sweatshop worker is a woman (90% of all sweatshop workers are women). She is young and, often, missing the chance for an education because she must work long hours to support a family. In America, she is often a recent or undocumented immigrant. She is almost always non-union and usually unaware that, even if she is in this country illegally, she still has rights as a worker (Taylor, 66).

In December of 1998, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights celebrated its 50th Anniversary. The governments of the world have pledged to honor the basic rights we are all born with. Unfortunately for too many people these promises have no meaning. Hundreds of millions of pe