Sweatshops

By common agreement, a sweatshop is a workplace that provides low or subsistence wages under harsh working conditions, such as long hours, unhealthy conditions, and/or an oppressive environment. Some observers see these work environments as essentially acceptable if the laborers freely contract to work in such conditions. For others, to call a workplace a sweatshop implies that the working conditions are illegitimate and immoral. The U.S. General Accounting Office would hone this definition for U.S. workplaces to include those environments where an employer violates more than one federal or state labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers' compensation, or industry registration laws. The AFL-CIO Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees would expand on that to include workplaces with systematic violations of global fundamental workers' rights. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) defines sweatshops much more broadly than either of these; even where a factory is clean, well organized, and harassment free, the ICCR considers it a sweatshop if its workers are not paid a sustainable living wage. The purpose of reviewing these varied definitions is to acknowledge that, by definition, sweatshops are defined as oppressive, unethical, and patently unfair to workers.

Sweatshops exist in all countries, including the United States, and have a lengthy history. One finds sweatshops in certain countries where there are no laws protecting workers from oppressive working conditions, as well as in those countries where the conditions allowed by the local laws remain substandard according to international laws. However, if by definition sweatshops involve the violation of laws, then no legal sweatshops can exist in those jurisdictions where there are significant worker protection laws. In fact, a 1994 U.S. Department of Labor spot check of garment operations in California found that 93% had health and safety violations, 73% of the garment makers had improper payroll records, 68% did not pay appropriate overtime wages, and 51% paid less than the minimum wage. For example, in 1995, labor officials in California uncovered a garment operation where more than 80 Thai workers were laboring behind razor wires and under armed guards making less than $2 per hour. In 1996, Labor Department officials found minimum wage violations in 43% of the firms sampled and overtime violations in 55% of the firms. Inspections of U.S. garment factories in 1999 continued to find wage and hours law violations at 61% of the factories in Los Angeles and 63% of the factories in New York.

However, strict labor laws, effective labor unions, and the growth of employee mobility and opportunity have attempted to eliminate sweatshops in developed countries. The vast majority of sweatshops currently are found in economically underdeveloped countries, especially those with large pools of unskilled labor, high unemployment, and few regulatory constraints. In an unregulated environment, the more broad definitions apply to include workplaces where the owner is not violating any local laws but instead is perhaps [Page 2035]violating international standards of human rights, such as provisions found in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. But in those developing countries, the incentives and circumstances arguably leave employers with few options. To attract purchasers for their goods, suppliers must keep labor costs low and, therefore, pay workers on a “piece rate” basis rather than hourly, where workers' wages are based on the number of items they produce during a particular time period. Consequently, the longer and harder an employee works, the more he or she will be paid. In some circumstances, since the piece rate is so low, workers have no choice but to contribute extraordinary hours to merely survive, hence the ICCR's emphasis on subsistence wages as the primary element of a modern-day sweatshop.

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