![[Feminists Against Sweatshops]](/images/worker.gif)
Frequently Asked Questions About
Sweatshops and Women Workers
Photo courtesy of Cara Metz, UNITE!Fact sheet prepared by Olivia Given, September 1997
What is a sweatshop?
The Department of Labor defines a work place as a sweatshop if it violates two or more of the most basic labor laws including child labor, minimum wage, overtime and fire safety laws. For many, the word sweatshop conjures up images of dirty, cramped, turn of the century New York tenements where immigrant women worked as seamstresses. High-rise tenement sweatshops still do exist, but, today, even large, brightly-lit factories can be the sites of rampant labor abuses.
Sweatshop workers report horrible working conditions including sub-minimum wages, no benefits, non-payment of wages, forced overtime, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, corporal punishment, and illegal firings. Children can often be found working in sweatshops instead of going to school. Sweatshop operators are notorious for avoiding giving maternity leave by firing pregnant women and forcing women workers to take birth control or to abort their pregnancies.
Sweatshop operators can best control a pool of workers that are ignorant of their rights as workers. Therefore, bosses often refuse to hire unionized workers and intimidate or fire any worker suspected of speaking with union representatives or trying to organize her fellow workers.
I thought sweatshops were a thing of the past. Why are we hearing so much about them again?
The notorious sweatshops of the age of Big Business (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) virtually disappeared after World War II because of increased government regulation of monopolies and the rise of trade unions. Sweatshops began to reappear again, however, during the 1980's and 1990's because of economic globalization. Today1s economy is described as global because advancements in technology have made it possible for large corporations that were once confined to a specific geographic location to become large "multi-nationals."
The popularity of the "free" market following the fall of Communism and a rise in anti-union sentiment, coupled with government programs (like NAFTA and GATT) designed to encourage free trade, have hastened the globalization process. Large corporations are now free to seek out low-wage havens: impoverished countries where corporations benefit from oppressive dictatorial regimes that actively suppress workers' freedoms of speech and association. Even in North America, where the North American Free Trade Agreement is supposed to enforce a minimum stardard for workers' rights, corporations concentrate in maquiladoras, "free trade zones" that were created by NAFTA, where the workers' rights provisions of the Agreement simply do not apply.
Corporations have been fleeing countries with relatively prosperous economies and stable, democracies in droves not only to take advantage of cheap labor, but to escape government scrutiny and criticism from human rights and workers' rights organizations. Guess? Clothing Co., for example, has always produced the majority of its goods in the U.S. but threatened to move 75% of this manufacturing to Mexico last year in response to Department of Labor citations and highly publicized humanitarian campaigns about Guess?'s California contract sweatshops.
Are there sweatshops in the U.S.?
According to the Department of Labor, over 50% of U.S. garment factories are sweatshops. Many sweatshops are run in this country's apparel centers: California, New York, Dallas, Miami and Atlanta.Source:Department of Labor
Where are most sweatshops?
There are probably sweatshops in every country in the world - anywhere where there is a pool of desperate, exploitable workers. Logically, the poorer a country is the more exploitable its people are. Labor violations are, therefore, especially widespread in third world countries. Nike has been criticized for unethical labor practices in its Chinese, Vietnamese and Indonesian shoe factories, and Haitian garment factories. Non-profit groups have documented the labor violations of retailers like Philips-Van Heusen and the Gap in factories throughout Latin America.
As mentioned above, however, developing countries are not the only ones with sweatshops. Guess? Clothing Corporation, for example, has been cited numerous times by the Department of Labor for the use of contract sweatshops in California.
Who is a typical sweatshop worker?
In the garment industry, the typical sweatshop worker is a woman (90% of all sweatshop workers are women). She is young and, often, missing the chance for an education because she must work long hours to support a family. In America, she is often a recent or undocumented immigrant. She is almost always non-union and usually unaware that, even if she is in this country illegally, she still has rights as a worker.
Which companies are operating sweatshops?
Many of the companies directly running sweatshops are small and don't have much name recognition. However, virtually every retailer in the U.S. has ties to sweatshops. The U.S. is the biggest market for the garment industry and almost all the garment sales in this country are controlled by 5 corporations: Wal-Mart, JC Penney, Sears, The May Company (owns and operates Lord & Taylor, Hecht1s, Filene1s and others) and Federated Department Stores (owns and operates Bloomingdale1s, Macy1s, Burdine1s, Stern1s and others).
Several industry leaders have been cited for labor abuses by the Department of Labor. Of these Guess? Clothing Co. is one of the worst offenders - Guess? was suspended indefinitely from the Department of Labor's list of "good guys" because their contractors were cited for so many sweatshop violations.
Other companies contract out their production to overseas manufacturers whose labor rights violations have been exposed by U.S. and international human rights groups. These include Nike, Disney, Wal-Mart, Reebok, Phillips- Van Heusen, the Gap, Liz Claiborne and Ralph Lauren.
Don't these company officials feel guilty for using sweatshops?
Large corporations almost always use contract manufacturing firms to produce their goods. In this way, corporations separate themselves from the production of their own goods and try to claim that the working conditions under which their goods are produced are not their responsibility.
In fact, it is the corporations that dictate the conditions of their workers. Corporations squeeze their contractors into paying sub-minimum wages. Large retailers and retail chains pressure contract manufacturers by refusing to pay more that a rock-bottom price for manufacturing orders. They also demand that their manufacturing contractors guarantee them a profit by buying back unsold merchandise at the end of each season. Manufacturers deal with this financial squeeze not by cutting their own profits, but by cutting workers' wages and benefits, and by compromising workers1 physical safety.
Many corporations also refuse to contract to union shops. So, even if a contractor does want to pay their workers a reasonable wage and allow them their freedom of association, he/she will probably be run out of business. In the end, it is the workers who pay for corporate greed.
How do American companies get away with running sweatshops?
Unfortunately the Department of Labor does not have enough personnel to inspect every workplace for labor violations. The Department of Labor only requires companies to have an internal monitoring policy, as opposed to an external monitoring policy where site inspections and evaluations would be unannounced and conducted by impartial parties. With internal monitoring there is no way to know whether companies are telling the truth about the conditions in their own factories. Many companies, like Nike, pay private accounting firms to come into their factories and assess the working conditions as "independent" monitors.
Even when companies are caught violating workers' rights, the punishment is often nominal. Fines that may seem hefty to us are insignificant to companies reaping multi-million dollar profits.
Why do foreign governments let foreign companies come into their country and exploit their people?
The truth is, business and government are a lot more connected to each other than most people think. Our economy rewards the highest bidder among consumers and the lowest bidder among producers. Foreign governments, desperate for economic gain, often deliberately set their national minimum wage below what it would actually take a worker to support herself and her family. The citizens of a country starve and suffer while the elite class and corrupt government officials reap the benefits of globalization.
What is the U.S. government doing about sweatshops?
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 officially prohibits sweatshops. However, because of understaffing at the Department of Labor and corporations' strategies for distancing themselves from the production of their goods by contracting production out to many different manufacturers, enforcement is lax. Earlier this year Stop Sweatshops Bills were introduced in Congress that would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to hold companies responsible for the labor violations of their contractors.
President Clinton has also created an Apparel Industry Task Force of both labor rights and corporate interests to address the issue of sweatshops. The Task Force's first resolution, however, failed to address many important issues for workers. The Task Force does not require member-corporations to pay their workers a living wage, instead requiring only the, often substandard, minimum wage set by the government of a corporation's host country. The resolution allows member-corporations to force their workers to labor as many as 60 hours a week during regular business circumstances, and even more under vaguely defined "extraordinary" business circumstances. The Task Force is due to release its second report this November. However, reports indicate that corporate interests continue to be unyielding to the requests of human and workers' rights groups.
Can the U.S. government enforce U.S. labor laws on U.S. companies operating abroad?
No, it can't. This is precisely the reason that many U.S. companies move their production operations overseas. Multi-national corporations actively seek out markets where wages are low, unions are outlawed and desperate people will work for almost any price. Nike, for example, first moved production out of the U.S. to Taiwan and South Korea when American workers organized to demand a reasonable wage. Then, when democracy took hold in Taiwan and South Korea, Nike moved production again, this time to China, Indonesia and Vietnam, all countries run by dictatorial military regimes that violently suppress workers' rights.
What are relations like between the U.S. government and the governments of countries where U.S. businesses are operating sweatshops?
Ironically, the U.S. gives humanitarian and other types of aid to countries whose poverty is, in part, a result of unscrupulous U.S. business operations. The U.S. government gives lip-service to workers' and human rights while promoting the business climates most conducive to sweatshops, namely, through NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and the U.S.'s "laissez-faire" attitude towards the growing markets in East and Southeast Asia.
What is the alternative to a sweatshop?
Corporations set up sweatshops in the name of "competition". In reality these corporations are not facing profit loses or bankruptcy, just too little profit! During this century, workers real wages have gone down while CEO's salaries have skyrocketed. In 1965 the average CEO made 44 times the average factory worker. Today, the average CEO makes 212 times the salary of the average worker.
Source:AFL-CIO
Corporations have skewed priorities. Many are putting expenses like CEO salaries and advertising costs before the well-being of their workers. For example, a Haitian worker sewing children's pajamas for Disney would have to toil full-time for 14.5 years to earn what Michael Eisner makes in one hour! Here's another staggering statistic: Nike could pay all its individual workers enough to feed and clothe themselves and their families if it would just devote 1% of its advertising budget to workers' salaries each year! Corporations falsely claim that they are victims of the global economy when, in fact, corporations help create and maintain this system.
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