The 2006 Fair Labor Association annual public report inspected 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 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor found that “18 countries have not complied with the International Labor Organization recommendation for a sufficient number of inspectors.” They were declared sweatshops. However, these countries account for a significant part of world industry. Leading industrialists of all time, from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs, have been accused and accused of creating unacceptable working conditions.
Definition
The sweatshop system is a factory or workshop, especially in the clothing industry, where manual workers work at very low wages for long hours in poor conditions and with many health risks. Marxists, in particular Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, dealt with the struggle against this social phenomenon. According to Lenin, the scientific system of squeezing sweat, which was the industry of the 19th century, was to immediately provoke a widespread uprising of workers.
"Scientific" sweat squeezing system
At one time, Lenin wrote two sensational articles: “The Scientific” System for Squeezing Sweat ”and“ The Taylor System - Enslaving a Man by Machine ”. In them, he exposed Taylorism and then industrial technologies as inhuman and exploitative. Nevertheless, he emphasized that the blatant 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 inadequate. But the concept of the sweatshop system arose between 1830 and 1850 as a special type of workshop, in which a certain type of intermediary sent other workers to make clothes in difficult conditions. Jobs created in the framework of such production were called sweatshops with a labor system and could contain several workers or several hundred.
Between 1832 and 1850, sweatshops attracted residents of poor rural areas to rapidly growing cities, as well as immigrants. These enterprises, which focused on increasing labor intensity, were criticized: union leaders called them crowded, poorly ventilated, and prone to fires and rats.
Workers fight
In the 1890s, a group was formed in Melbourne, calling itself the National League Against Sweating, and successfully campaigned for a minimum wage through unions. The group of the same name began the campaign in 1906 in the UK, which led to the adoption of the Trade Council Act of 1909.
In 1910, the International Union of Women's Clothing Workers was created to try to improve the situation of these workers.
Criticism of clothing sewing workshops has become a major force in regulating workplace safety and labor laws. Since so many sought to change working conditions, the term “sweatshops” began to mean a wider range of jobs, the conditions of which were considered inferior. In the United States, investigative reporters known as fraudsters wrote business exposures, and progressive politicians campaigned for new laws. Noteworthy exposures of the working conditions in the sweatshop include Jacob Riis's photo-documentary film, Like the Other Half Lives, and Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, a fictional story about the meat industry.
20th century
In 1911, the negative public perception of sweatshops was reinforced by the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York. The central role of this time and place is in the Lower East Side Museum, which is part of the Lower East Side National Historic Site. Although labor unions, minimum wage laws, fire safety rules, and labor laws have made sweatshops (in the initial sense) scarcer in the developed world, they have not eliminated them, and this term is increasingly associated with factories in developing countries.
Our days
In a 1994 report, the United States Government Accountability Office found that there are still thousands of sweatshops in the United States using the term sweatshops as any employer who violates more than one federal or state labor law, regulating minimum wages and overtime, child labor, homework at work, safety and health, compensation for employees, etc. This recent definition eliminates any historical differences in the role of intermediary or manufactured goods and focuses on the legal standards of jobs in developed countries. The debate between proponents of third-world production and the anti-sweatshop movement is whether such standards can be applied in the workplace in the developing world.
Rampant exploitation
Sweatshops are also sometimes involved in 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 is more likely if the workforce consists of children or an uneducated rural poor. Because they often exist in places where there are no effective laws on workplace safety or the environment, sweatshops sometimes harm their employees or the environment at a faster rate than would be acceptable in developed countries. Sometimes correctional labor institutions (using prisoners) are also considered a form of diaphoretic system.
Exhausting work
The working conditions of sweatshops in many cases resemble prison labor, especially from a Western point of view. In 2014, Apple was caught stating that it was “unable to protect its employees” at one of its plants. Overloaded workers were caught falling asleep during a 12-hour shift, and an undercover reporter was supposed to work 18 days in a row. Then the workers are transferred to a state of forced labor, if even one working day is not taken into account, most of them are immediately dismissed. These working conditions have been a source of monstrous unrest in factories in the past. In the Chinese sweatshops, where the number of suicide workers is known to increase, suicide networks have been set up covering the entire site to stop overwork and stress when workers jump to death. But all this is not news - even Henry Ford was once accused of such atrocities.
Etymology
The phrase “sweatshops” was coined in 1850, referring to a factory or workshop where workers are treated unfairly, for example, with low wages, long hours of work and in poor conditions. Since 1850, immigrants have flocked to work in sweatshops in cities such as London and New York for more than one century. Many of them worked in tiny, stuffy rooms that are at risk of fire and rat infection. The term “Taylor's sweatshop system” was used in Charles Kingsley's Cheap Clothes treatise, where he described jobs that created hellish conditions. The idea of a minimum wage and a labor union was not developed until the 1890s. This problem seems to be solved by some organization against sweatshops. However, the current development of the problem demonstrates a different situation.
Brands
World famous fashion brands such as H&M, Nike, Adidas and Uniqlo deal with issues such as sweatshops. In 2015, protesters against sweatshops opposed the Japanese brand Uniqlo in Hong Kong. Along with the Japanese anti-sweatshirt organization Human Rights Now!, Students and scholars at the Hong Kong Labor Union Against Corporate Illegal Behavior (SACOM) protested against the "harsh and dangerous" working conditions at Uniqlo factories. According to a recent report released by SACOM, Uniqlo suppliers are accused of "systematically not paying extra for their work, forcing them to work overtime and exposing them to unsafe working conditions, including floors covered with sewage, poor ventilation and stuffy temperatures." On the other hand, referring to the Clean Clothing campaign, in 2016, strategic H&M suppliers from Bangladesh were reported who have dangerous working conditions, for example, lack of vital equipment for workers.
Fleet brands are not the only ones that attract sweat factories. German sportswear giant Adidas was accused of having Indonesian sweatshops in 2000. Adidas was accused of underpayments, overtime, physical abuse and the use of child labor.
Nike
Another sportswear giant, Nike, recently faced a big wave of protests against sweatshops in the United States. It was organized by the United Student Sweatshops School (USAS) and was held in Boston, Washington, Bangalore and San Pedro Sula. They claimed that workers at the Nike contract factory in Vietnam suffer from theft of wages, verbal abuse and harsh working conditions with “temperatures exceeding the 90 degree limit”. Since the 90s, Nike has reportedly been using sweat factories and child labor. Regardless of his efforts to make a difference, Nike's image has been tarnished by this problem and has been tarnished for the past two decades. Nike established an independent division whose goal was to improve the lives of workers in 1996. In 1999, it was renamed the Fair Labor Association and is a non-profit organization, which includes representatives of companies, human rights and trade union organizations involved in monitoring and managing labor resources.
To improve its image as a brand, Nike has published annual sustainability reports since 2001, and an annual Corporate Social Responsibility Report since 2005, mentioning its commitments, standards, and audits. However, the issue of sweatshops continues to bother Nike. Similar stories are still heard in the fashion industry in recent decades.
The opinion of supporters of free trade
In 1997, economist Jeffrey Sachs said: “It’s not that there are too many sweatshops that worry me, but that there are too few of them.” Sachs and other proponents of free trade and the global movement of capital allude to the economic theory of comparative analysis. This theory says that international trade will ultimately make workers better. The theory also says that developing countries improve their condition by doing what they do better than industrialized countries. Developed countries will also be better, because their workers can go to work that they do better. These are jobs that, according to some economists, usually imply a level of education and training that is extremely difficult to obtain in developing countries.
Thus, economists such as Sachs say that developing countries receive factories and jobs that they would not otherwise have received. 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 states do not try to increase the wages of workers in sweatshops for fear of losing investment and reducing GDP. The same factors scared the governments of developed countries back in the days of the Fordism system.
However, this only means that the average wage in the world will grow at a constant rate. A nation is lagging behind only if it requires wages that exceed the current market price for this labor. According to liberal economists, the struggle with the system will only lead to job cuts.