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Sweatshop

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A sweatshop is a factory or workshop that has attributes in common with the workplaces of the pejoratively-named sweating system of the 1840s. Sweatshops arose at a time when workers did not have the protections afforded by trade unions or labor laws, and sweatshops are synonymous with working conditions that would be widely unacceptable or even illegal today in a developed country, but are controversial because they still exist in developing countries.

When used today as a pejorative term, sweatshop may be linked to child labor, labor law violations, or factories with low levels of wages or workplace safety, or employers that prevent workers from unionizing or advocating for themselves in other ways. It is also used to suggest a workplace that is physically or mentally abusive, or that crowds, confines, or compels workers, as would be the case with penal labor or slave labor.

History of sweatshops

While many workplaces through history may have been relatively crowded, dangerous, low-paying, and without job security, the concept of a sweatshop has its origins between 1830 and 1850 as a very specific type of workplace, in which specific work, garment making, was directed by a certain type of middleman, the sweater.

Prior to 1830, fine clothing had been an expensive, custom item produced primarily by male members of the organized tailor's guild [[1]]. But between 1830 and 1850, as the Industrial Revolution transformed into the Second Industrial Revolution, sweatshop production of inexpensive clothing displaced members of the tailors guild, and replaced them with lower-skilled workers performing piece work at lower wages and inferior conditions.

The trend away from tailors was accelerated by the advent of a practical, foot-powered sewing machine in 1846. The terms sweater for the middleman and sweating system for the process of subcontracting piecework were used in early critiques like Charles Kingsley's Cheap Clothes and Nasty, written in 1850. The workplaces created for the sweating system where called sweatshops, and may have consisted of only a few workers, or as many as 100 or more.

In the sweatshop of 1850, the role of the sweater as middleman (and they were almost exclusively men) and subcontractor (or sub-subcontractor) was considered key, because he served to keep workers isolated in small workshops. This isolation made workers unsure of their supply of work, and unable to organize against their true employer through collective bargaining. Instead, tailors or other clothing retailers, would subcontract the sweater, who in turn might subcontract to another sweater, who would ultimately pay workers a piece rate for each article of clothing or seam produced. Many critics asserted that the middleman made his profit by finding the most desparate workers who could be paid an absolute minimum. While workers who produced the most pieces earned more, less productive workers might earn what would be considered a starvation wage, and injured workers could immediately lose their job. Sweaters could increase their profits by hiring women or children to work at lower rates.

Between 1850 and 1900, sweatshops attracted the rural poor to rapidly-growing cities, and attracted immigrants to places like East London, England and New York City's garment district, located near the tenements of New York's Lower East Side. Wherever they were located, sweatshops also attracted critics and labor leaders who cited them as crowded, poorly ventilated, and prone to fires and rat infestations, since much of the work was done by many people crowded into small tenement rooms.

In 1900, the International Ladies' Garment Worker Union (ILGWU) was founded in an effort to improve the condition of these workers.

Public criticism of garment sweatshops became a major force behind workplace safety regulation and labor laws, at the same time that the term sweatshop came to describe a broader set of workplaces whose conditions were considered inferior. Exposés of workplaces deemed inferior, such as Jacob Riis' photo documentaryHow the Other Half Lives or Upton Sinclair's descriptions of the meat packing industry in his book,The Jungle, fueled this criticism.

In 1911, negative public perceptions of sweatshops were galvanized by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City. The pivotal role of this time and place is chronicled at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, part of the Lower East Side Tenement National Historic Site.

While trade unions, minimum wage laws, fire safety codes, and labor laws have made sweatshops (in the original sense) rarer in the developed world, they did not eliminate them, and the term came to be increasingly associated with factories in the developing world.

In a report issued in 1994, the United States Government Accountability Office found that there were still thousands of sweatshops in the United States, using a definition of a sweatshop as any "employer that violates more than one federal or state labor law governing minimum wage and overtime, child labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers’ compensation, or industry registration" [2]. This recent definition eliminates any historical distinction about the role of a middleman or the items produced, and focuses on the legal standards of developed country workplaces. An area of controversy between supporters of outsourcing production to the Third World and the anti-sweatshop movement is whether such standards can or should be applied to the workplaces of the developing world.

Sweatshops are also sometimes implicated in human trafficking when workers have been tricked into starting work without informed consent, or when workers are kept at work through debt bondage or mental duress, all of which are more likely in cases where the workforce is drawn from children or the uneducated rural poor. Because they often exist in places without effective workplace safety or environmental laws, sweatshops sometimes injure their workers or the environment at greater rates than would be acceptable in developed countries. Sometimes penal labor facilities (employing prisoners) are grouped under the sweatshop label.

Sweatshops have proved a difficult issue to resolve because their roots lie in the conceptual foundations of the world economy. Developing countries like India, China, Vietnam, and Honduras encourage the outsourcing of work from the developed world to factories within their borders in order to provide employment for their people and profits to their employers. The shift of production to developing countries is part of the process known as Globalization (or Globalisation), but may also be described as neoliberal globalization to emphasise the role that free market economics plays in outsourcing.

Forces For and Against Sweatshops

Causes and defenses of sweatshops, from a laissez-faire capitalist perspective

Jeffrey 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. A few prominent liberals, too, have championed sweatshops, most notably New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

Free market defenders say that the third world can do sweatshop work "better." In such cases, the theory of comparative advantage claims that outsourcing and trade can make most parties better off. The theory suggests that developed countries will be able to buy goods more cheaply although the theory also assumes that the developed country workers who lose their jobs can shift to "higher value" tasks. Developing countries will be better off, the theory says, because they get factories and jobs that they would not otherwise have had.

As for the quality of sweatshop jobs themselves, the defense usually runs along these lines: although wages and working conditions may appear inferior by developed-country standards, they are actually improvements over what life in developing countries had been like before sweatshops were opened. The proof of this, say free-market advocates, is that if sweatshop jobs did not improve their workers' standard of living, those workers would not have taken the jobs. Defenders often point out that the choice isn't between high-paid and low-paid work (as it might be in a developed country), but between sweatshop work and subsistence farming, prostitution, or no work at all. Most developing countries lack (or have insufficient) unemployment insurance, and a lack of work can result in starvation or malnourishment.

Wages in third world sweatshops typically carry nominal rates that are clearly below nominal wage rates in other countries. For example, in 2003, Honduran factory workers were paid $0.15 to make a Sean John-brand t-shirt that cost its U.S. bulk importer $3.65 and sells at retail for $40.00[1] Critics would cite the irony that sweatshop workers don't earn enough money to buy the products that they make, which are often commonplace items such as t-shirts, shoes, or toys. Defenders would cite purchasing power parity studies in defense of sweatshop wage levels. For example, the $0.15 that a Honduran worker might be paid to produce a designer-brand shirt, is comparable, in terms of purchasing power, to $3.00 in the United States. Also, the very reason that jobs are exported to them from wealthier counties is that they are willing (as well as not prohibited by minimum wage laws) to work cheaper than workers in wealthier countries. For example, as Johan Norberg argues, "If workers were paid U.S. wages in Vietnam, employers wouldn’t be able to hire them. The alternative for most workers would be to go back to agriculture, where they could work longer hours and get irregular and much lower wages." Norberg says that "sweatshops are a natural stage of development," and that cheap labor is the competitive advantage of poor countries, and that is what is going to allow them to pull themselves out of poverty. He says, "When unions, when protectionists, when uncompetitive corporations in the U.S. say that we shouldn’t buy from countries like Vietnam because of its labor standards, they’ve got it all wrong. They’re saying: 'Look, you are too poor to trade with us. And that means that we won’t trade with you. We won’t buy your goods until you’re as rich as we are.' That’s totally backwards. These countries won’t get rich without being able to export goods."[2]

On whether low-paid and dangerous sweatshop work can alleviate suffering and improve living standards, defenders cite a 1997 UNICEF study. The study[3] estimated that 5,000 to 7,000 Nepalese children turned to prostitution after the US banned that country's carpet exports in the 1990s, and that after the Child Labor Deterrence 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." The UNICEF study found these alternative jobs "more hazardous and exploitative than garment production."

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Anti-sweatshop forces: From abolitionism to anti-globalization

Various groups and historical movements have been associated with what today constitutes the anti-sweatshop movement.

Some of the earliest sweatshop critics were found in the 19th century abolitionist movement that had originally coalesced in opposition to chattel slavery. Many abolitionists saw similarities between slavery and sweatshop work. As slavery was successively outlawed in industrial countries between 1794 (in France) and 1865 (in the United States), some abolitionists sought to broaden the anti-slavery consensus to include other forms of harsh labor, including sweatshops. As it happened, the first significant law to address sweatshops (the Factory Act of 1833) was passed in the United Kingdom at about the same time that slavery was outlawed there (1834), and the anti-sweatshop movement drew from much the same reservior of supporters and social thinkers. Similarly, once the United States had ended slavery during the American Civil War, the reconstruction period saw social reformers turn their attention to the plight of the urban workforce.

Ultimately, the abolitionist movement split apart. Some advocates focused on working conditions and found common cause with trade unions and such political groups as the Marxists and socialists in the 19th century or the muckrakers and progressive movement in 20th century America. Others focused on the slave trade and involuntary servitude in the colonial world. For those groups that remained focused on slavery per se, sweatshops became one of the primary objects of a long definitional controversy. Workplaces categorized as 'sweatshops' encompassed a wide range of practices and contexts. Moreover, there were fundamental philosophical disagreements about what constituted slavery. Unable to agree on the status of sweatshops, the abolitionists working with the League of Nations and the United Nations utimately backed away from efforts to define slavery, and focused instead on a common precursor of slavery, human trafficking.[4]

Those focused on working conditions included Friedrich Engels, whose book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 would inspire the Marxist movement named for his collaborator Karl Marx. In the United Kingdom the Factory Act was revised six further times between 1844 and 1878 to help improve the condition of workers by limiting work hours and the use of child labor. Concern over the conditions of workers as described by the muckrakers during the Progressive Era in the United States saw the passage of new workers rights laws and ultimately resulted in the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 during the New Deal.

More recently, the anti-globalization movement has arisen in opposition to corporate globalization, a process in which multinational corporations move business overseas in order to lower costs and raise profits.

The anti-sweatshop movement has much in common with the anti-globalization movement. Both consider sweatshops to be clearly harmful, and both have 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 is similar to the sweating system. They assert that outsourcing and subcontracting of manufacturing has made abuses of sweatshop workers more likely, and that the companies show the same disregard that was shown by past clothing retailers. Furthermore, they argue that there tends to be a race to the bottom as multinationals leap from one low-wage country to another searching for lower production costs, in the same way that sweaters would have steered production to the lowest cost sub-contractor.

Anti-globalization activists and environmentalists also deplore transfer of heavy industrial manufacturing (such as chemical production) to the developing world. Although chemical factories have little in common with sweatshops in the original sense, detractors describe them as such and claim negative environmental and health impacts (such as pollution and birth defects, respectively) on workers and the local community.

Various groups support or embody the anti-sweatshop movement. United Students Against Sweatshops is active on college campuses. 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 end of manufacturing in the developed world. For example, the American labor union UNITE HERE, which represents garment workers, has only approximately 3,000 garment workers remaining in its base, because larger garment making operations have already been transferred overseas, and the US garment production facilities that remain are small, disconnected workplaces, similar to those of 100 or more years ago.

Current Status of Sweatshops

Some companies have acceded to public pressure to reduce or end their use of sweatshops. Such firms 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.

In the United States, shoemaker New Balance is notable for changing its policies after intense pressure from campus anti-sweatshop groups. Clothing retailer The Gap has significantly changed its policies, but other campanies belonging to GAP Inc. such as Old Navy and Banana Republic have not. Walmart and Nike are two of the largest corporate sponsors of sweatshop labor, but believe that they have safeguards in place to avoid using the worst sweatshops.

The World Bank estimates that today, 1/5th of human beings live under the international poverty line.[5] 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, the two countries with the largest number of workers in sweatshops. Against this progress in the developing world, one should also note that economic inequality between the richest and poorest 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."[5]

Few would deny that consumers in several historical eras have purchased cheap sweatshop-produced goods as a way of raising their own living standards. Some would object that this came at the expense of others. Few would deny that Great Britain and the United States used sweatshops as part of the Second Industrial Revolution that raised living standards in both places. Some would advocate a similar path for India and China today, while others claim that rapid industrialization and liberal international trade impose too high a price on some, and advocate less or "fairer" trade between the developed and developing worlds instead.

But whether sweatshops ultimately exacerbate inequalities or are an appropriate tool for raising in living standards remains a hotly-contested question.

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ "Sean John's Sweatshops". Retrieved 2006-04-19.
  2. ^ Poor Man's Hero, an interview with Johan Norberg (author of In Defense of Global Capitalism), Reason magazine, December 2003.
  3. ^ UNICEF. "The State of the World's Children 1997". Retrieved 2004-04-19.
  4. ^ Miers, Suzanne (2003). Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem. Alta Mira Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
  5. ^ a b The Institute of Governmental Studies (2001). "Global Poverty: The Gap Between the World's Rich and Poor Is Growing, and the Dying Continues". Public Affairs Report. 42 (2). Retrieved 2004-04-19.
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