The Negative Effects Textile Sweatshops in the Economy
Sweatshops are manufacturing plants or workplace environments, particularly clothing
businesses, where employees perform manual labor and work long hours all under poor
conditions and at very low wages. The most commonly manufactured products that sweatshops
produce are clothing, shoes, coffee, rugs, toys, bananas, and chocolate. The US Department of
Labor says that a sweatshop, as a factory, disobeys at least two labor laws. Sweatshops often
have low wages, child labor, poor working conditions, lack of benefits, and make employees
work tremendous amounts of hours. Sweatshops do not lessen poverty. Most of the employee’s
pay checks are spent on food for their families to survive. Textile sweatshops in developing
countries have a negative effect on workers and consumers.
The biggest problems regarding sweatshops are how the employees are treated and the
conditions that they are forced to work in. The employees of sweatshops are treated very badly.
They are forced to work a tremendous amount of hours for very little pay. In the article “In
Defense of “Sweatshops”” Benjamin Powell states, “At 10 hours per day, which is not
uncommon in a sweatshop, a worker would earn $3.10” (Powell 535). Also encountered is the
fact that numerous employees come across problems with their pay. There are some months they
do not even get paid and when they finally do it will be just for the one month. A study showed
that doubling the salary of sweatshop workers would only increase the consumer cost of an item
by 1.8%, while consumers would be willing to pay 15% more to know a product did not come
from a sweatshop. Their supervisors are constantly threatening and abusing them unless they
continue to work in these harsh conditions. The employees are afraid to get up, even to take a
bathroom break. The employees are usually denied bathroom breaks. The employees frequently
experience physical and verbal abuse and fight to complete high quotas every day.
One of the earliest examples of a sweatshop was in the crude textile mills of Ecuador.
Spanish conquerors put the native population to work in sweatshop conditions in the
manufacture of cloth, rough garments, and assorted textile goods. The use of the term is more
recently traced to working conditions in England’s emerging manufacturing industries, where
women and children sweated in jobs performed under horrid conditions-the work being
monotonous, the hours long, and the pay miserably low. The British government established a
Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System in 1889, thus publicly exposing
the conditions for the first time. With massive immigration into the United States, especially
beginning in the late 1880s, sweatshops became common in American cities on the east coast.
Millions of children, between the ages of five and fourteen, work in third world countries.
There are so many children who do not have a choice in working; they are forced to work to help
support their families. Children are denied a normal childhood and schooling, missing some of
their best years of being a kid. Some children are even physically abused. Some are forced to
stay in the workplace and not able to go home to their families. Some of these children are even
kidnapped and forced to work. Working in sweatshops is not an ideal place for anybody;
however, for children, risks are frequently doubled. Just because the conditions are healthy and
safe for adults does not mean it will be safe for a child to work there, they are faced with
numerous safety concerns that an adult would be able to handle. These children are thrown in
these sweatshops without proper training or adequately supervised, exposing them to these safety
hazards. These two circumstances increase their chances of injuries. One of the main reasons of
child employment in sweatshops is the need to provide for their families without it they would
not survive. In 2000, more than 11,000 sweatshops in the US violated the minimum wage and
overtime laws, while over 16,000 had broken health and safety laws.
Most of the workers that work in sweatshops are women. It is easier for male supervisors
to push female workers around. Male supervisors would force the young women workers to have
sex with them. They force the women to get on birth control and have routine pregnancy tests
just so they do not have to worry about providing or granting maternity leave or provide
appropriate health benefits. If their pregnancy test results come out positive, then they are forced
to take time off without pay or they are fired. Some of the workers are scared to leave their
