Fair Labor Association 2006 Annual Public Report audited factories in 18 countries including Bangladesh, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, China, India, Vietnam, Honduras, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico and USA. The US Department of Labor's 2015 Worst Forms of Child Labor Findings found that "18 countries have not met the International Labor Organization's recommendation for a sufficient number of inspectors." They were declared sweatshops. However, these countries account for a significant part of the world's industry. Leading industrialists of all time, from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs, have been and are accused of creating unacceptable working conditions.
Definition
A sweatshop is a factory or workshop, especially in the clothing industry, where manual laborers work at very low wages inlong hours in poor conditions and with many he alth risks. Marxists, in particular Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, were engaged in the fight against this social phenomenon. In Lenin's opinion, the scientific sweat-squeezing system that was 19th-century industry was bound to prompt a widespread workers' uprising.
"Scientific" sweat squeezing system
At one time, Lenin wrote two sensational articles: "The "scientific" system of squeezing sweat" and "Taylor's system - the enslavement of man by a machine." In them, he exposed Taylorism and the then industrial technologies as inhuman and exploitative. Nevertheless, he emphasized that such brazen exploitation of the proletariat only brings the world communist revolution closer, as it awakens class hatred in the hearts of the proletarians.
History
Many jobs in history have been overcrowded, underpaid and underserved. But the concept of the sweatshop emerged between 1830 and 1850 as a specific type of workshop in which a certain type of intermediary directed other workers to make clothes under difficult conditions. The jobs created by this production were called sweatshops and could contain a few workers or several hundred.
Between 1832 and 1850, sweatshops attracted poor rural residents to the booming cities, as well as immigrants. These enterprises, focused on increasing the intensity of work, have been criticized: union leaders have called themovercrowded, poorly ventilated and prone to fires and rat infestations.
Workers struggle
In the 1890s, a group calling itself the "National Sweating League" was formed in Melbourne and successfully campaigned for a minimum wage through unions. A group of the same name began campaigning from 1906 in the UK, leading to the passage of the Trade Councils Act 1909.
In 1910, the International Union of Women's Clothing Workers was formed to try to improve the situation of these workers.
Criticism of clothing sewing shops has become a major force in workplace safety regulation and labor laws. As so many sought to change working conditions, the term "sweatshop" came to refer to a broader range of jobs that were considered substandard. In the United States, investigative journalists known as fraudsters wrote exposés of business practices, and progressive politicians campaigned for new laws. Notable exposés of working conditions in the sweatshop include Jacob Rees' photodocumentary "Like the Other Half Lives" and Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle", a fictional account of the meat industry.
20th century
In 1911, the negative public perception of sweatshops was exacerbated by a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York. The centrality of this time and place is held in the Lower East Side Museum, which is part ofLower East Side National Historic Site. While unions, minimum wage laws, fire regulations, and labor laws have made sweatshops (in the original sense) rarer in the developed world, they have not eliminated them, and the term is increasingly associated with factories in the developing world.
Our days
In a report released in 1994, the United States Government Accountability Office found that there are still thousands of sweatshops in the United States that use the term "sweatshop" as any employer that violates more than one federal law or state labor laws governing minimum wage and overtime, child labor, workplace homework, occupational safety and he alth, workers' compensation, etc. This recent definition eliminates any historical differences in the role of the middleman or goods produced and focuses on the legal standards of jobs in developed countries. The debate between Third World manufacturing advocates and the anti-sweatshop movement is whether such standards can be applied to workplaces in the developing world.
Rampant exploitation
Sweatshops are also sometimes involved in human trafficking, when workers are forced to start working without informed consent, or when they are kept at work due to debt slavery or psychological coercion, all of which are moreprobably if the labor force consists of children or the uneducated rural poor. Because they often exist in places that lack effective workplace safety or environmental laws, sweatshops sometimes harm their employees or the environment at higher rates than would be acceptable in developed countries. Sometimes correctional labor institutions (using prisoners) are also considered a form of sweatshops.
Exhausting labor
The working conditions of sweatshops are in many cases reminiscent of prison labor, especially from a Western perspective. In 2014, Apple was caught "failing to protect its workers" at one of its factories. Overworked workers were caught falling asleep during a 12-hour shift, and an undercover reporter had to work 18 consecutive days. Then the workers go into a state of forced labor, if even one working day is not counted, most of them are fired immediately. These working conditions have been the source of monstrous unrest in factories in the past. China's sweatshops, where suicide workers are known to be on the rise, have set up suicide networks covering the entire site to stop overwork and stress as workers jump to their deaths. But all this is not news - even Henry Ford was once accused of such atrocities.
Etymology
The phrase "sweatshop" was coined in 1850, referring to a factory ora workshop where workers are treated unfairly, such as with low wages, long hours, and poor conditions. Since 1850, immigrants have flocked to work in sweatshops in cities like London and New York for more than a century. Many of them worked in tiny, stuffy rooms that were at risk of fire and rat infestation. The term "Taylor's sweatshop" was used in Charles Kingsley's tract Cheap Clothes, where he described jobs that create hellish conditions. The idea of a minimum wage and labor union was not developed until the 1890s. This problem seems to have been solved by some anti-sweatshop organization. However, the current development of the problem demonstrates a different situation.
Brands
World-famous fashion brands such as H&M, Nike, Adidas and Uniqlo are tackling issues like sweatshops. In 2015, anti-sweatshop protesters protested the Japanese brand Uniqlo in Hong Kong. Along with the Japanese anti-sweatshop organization Human Rights Now!, students and academics from the Hong Kong Labor Organization Against Corporate Misconduct (SACOM) protested the "harsh and dangerous" working conditions at Uniqlo's factories. According to a recent report published by SACOM, Uniqlo suppliers are accused of "systematically underpaying for their work by forcing them to work overtime and exposing them to unsafe working conditions, including floors covered withsewage, poor ventilation and stuffy temperatures.” On the other hand, referring to the Clean Clothes campaign, strategic H&M suppliers from Bangladesh were reported in 2016 with hazardous working conditions, such as lack of vital equipment for workers.
Sweatshirt brands are not the only ones to attract sweat factories. German sportswear giant Adidas was accused of running Indonesian sweatshops in 2000. Adidas was accused of underpayment, overtime, physical abuse and child labor.
Nike
Another sportswear giant, Nike, recently faced a big wave of protests against sweatshops in the US. It is organized by the United Students School Against Sweatshops (USAS) and has been held in Boston, Washington DC, Bangalore and San Pedro Sula. They alleged that workers at a Nike contract factory in Vietnam were suffering from wage theft, verbal abuse, and harsh working conditions with "temperatures exceeding the 90-degree limit." Since the 90s, Nike has been reported to use sweat factories and child labor. Regardless of his efforts to change the situation, Nike's image has been tarnished by this issue and has remained tarnished for the past two decades. Nike established an independent division dedicated to improving the lives of workers in 1996. In 1999, it was renamed the Fair Labor Association and is a non-profit organization, which includesrepresentatives of companies, human rights and trade union organizations involved in monitoring and managing labor resources.
To improve its brand image, Nike has been publishing annual sustainability reports since 2001 and an annual corporate social responsibility report since 2005, mentioning its commitments, standards and audits. Nevertheless, the sweatshop problem continues to plague Nike. Similar stories are still being heard in the fashion industry in recent decades.
Free trade opinion
In 1997, economist Jeffrey Sachs said, "My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops, but that there are too few." Sacks and other proponents of free trade and global capital movements cite comparative economics. This theory says that international trade will ultimately make the lives of workers better. The theory also says that developing countries improve their fortunes by doing what they do better than industrialized countries. Developed countries will also be better off because their workers can go to work they do better. These are jobs that some economists say usually involve a level of education and training that is exceptionally difficult to obtain in developing countries.
So economists like Sachs say that developing countries are getting factories and jobs they wouldn't get otherwise. Some will say that this situation occurs when developing countries try to raise wages because sweatshops usually just move to a new, more hospitable state. This leads to a situation where governments do not try to raise wages for sweatshop workers for fear of losing investment and reducing GDP. The same factors frightened the governments of developed countries even during the existence of the Fordist system.
However, this only means that the average wage in the world will grow at a constant rate. A nation only falls behind if it demands wages in excess of the current market price for that labor. According to liberal economists, fighting the system will only lead to job losses.
