Sweatshops

A “sweatshop” is not merely a firm that offers poorly paid jobs or an authoritarian system of work relations. The wages such companies pay are below the federally mandated minimum, or the conditions of employment they provide are substandard in terms of the criteria first set in 1938 by the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act, or, in the case of other countries, employers offer wages below the labor standards of that country's laws. Or, as John Galtung puts it, committed violence against persons that is not limited to physical acts that do them directly physical harm. This violence may also be understood as avoidable insults to basic human needs—and more generally to life, which means a lower level of life satisfaction, below what is required to maintain a stable and acceptable quality of life.

Sweatshops are typically found in the “garment,” or apparel, industry in the United States and abroad. In them, we find child labor, long hours, low pay, sexual harassment, environmental hazards, employment-generated health problems, and sometimes indentured servitude. These problems basically affect women workers, since women are the choice labor force for this industry.

Most important, women work for lower wages than men do. A woman's wage reflects the measure of value that men and women place on them. To recognize how much value people place on their productive and reproductive work is to [Page 847]recognize how much to calculate a woman's wage is worth, a fair and just recompense for workers whose primary activity in life is defined by their relationship to the family—as wife and mother. Only the higher-paying industrial jobs are defined as appropriate for men. The man is considered the proper support for the family, and the woman is subordinate in the workforce.