Sweatshop

Categories: Manufacturing | Labor

A sweatshop is a factory, commonly misperceived to exist only in third-world countries. Sweatshops are not defined by their locations but instead their conditions. In sweatshops, people often work for a very small wage, producing a variety of products such as clothes, toys, shoes, electronics and other consumer goods. The term is usually used as a pejorative, and connotes 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, or sexually, 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.

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History

There have been similar business practices since the beginnings of capitalism. Sweatshops are not a new phenomenon. The United States and Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweatshops that employed low-skilled workers and immigrants. Originally, middle management would determine how much profit they could 'sweat' off the labor of others. These exploded in U.S. urban areas in the industrial revolution. Labor organizing and new laws and regulations in developed countries stemming from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire eventually forced employers to increase workplace safety and pay minimum wages. 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. Currently, US sweatshops are defined by the GAO.

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Anatomy

In the current world manufacturing economy, sweatshops are primarily located in the developing world-- particularly Asia and Latin America, while the owners are located in more wealthy nations. Owners usually work through a process of subcontracting, meaning they don't own the sweatshops themselves but employ smaller organizations who own the sweatshops and produce the required goods. Some sweatshops are owned by brand-name multinational corporations (e.g. Reebok), but most are either locally owned or owned by middle-level corporations that are often rooted in least developed countries like Bangladesh or Honduras.

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Ethics

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The free-market defence

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 who sell their products in wealthy western countries – at western prices – have a responsibility to pay their workers according to basic western standards. They often point out the irony of the fact that sweatshop workers don't earn enough money to buy the products that they make.

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The non-intervention defence


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 U.S. banned that country's carpet exports in the 1990s. Also, after the Child Labor Deterence 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.[1]

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.

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Anti-Sweatshop Movement

Sweatshops have proved a difficult issue to solve because its roots lie in the conceptual foundations of the world economy. Thus, sweatshop labour is 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 and on college campuses 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.

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Pro-Sweatshop Movement

Jeffery 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. The idea being that jobs provide money for food and the people would go hungry without. Also, sweatshop industries and grueling farm labor are usually found in countries as their economies develop. It was not unusual for children in England and the United States to work long hours in factories and farms during the 1800's.

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Results

Some companies have bowed to public pressure to reduce their dependence on sweatshop labour and have reduced or ended this practice in their operations. Those 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, though Old Navy and Banana Republic have not. The world bank estimates that today, 1/5th of human beings live under the international poverty line. [2] 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." [3]
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See also

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External links

de:Sweatshop