Sweatshops: No Longer a Thing of the Past

When someone says the word "sweatshop," the mind automatically pictures a cramped, filthy, dangerous factory in a large industrial city district such as New York’s lower east side. A century ago, immigrant women and their children worked for long hours inside factories such as these for very little pay and no benefits. Many workers had to bring home even more work in the evenings, just to make ends meet, despite working 15 hours or more during the day.

In 1900, a group of workers gathered together and created the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in order to protest and condemn the unsafe working conditions the minimal wages they were being paid. Nine years later they organized the very first strike of garment workers, which became known as "The Great Revolt." This protest resulted in more than 60,000 garment workers walking the streets of New York City carrying signs to protest the conditions and fight for their rights. The women and children standing on picket lines were either targeted with rifles or beaten for participating. Yet ILGWU was able to win, securing standards for wage and hour limitations as well as impartial dispute arbitration.

But the problem of sweatshops continued throughout the garment industry and others. A fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York drew harsh attention to the danger of sweatshops, because people were unable to escape due to being locked inside the building. Some people jumped to their deaths out of the windows on upper floors, rather than burn to death like many others were. In total, 146 workers died, solely because of the sweatshop conditions.

In 1938, President Roosevelt signed into effect the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which was national legislation that prohibited industrial homework and child labor. The law established a minimum wage and legislated that workers be paid overtime pay for anything beyond 40 hours a week. It brought immediate relief and protection to tens of thousands of people who were working in factories across America.

Recently, however, many manufacturers have moved their operations overseas and workers’ unions have lost some of their power. Budget cuts enacted during the Reagan and Bush administrations put severe limits on the Department of Labor’s ability to police garment factories, and now there are only 800 DOL inspectors available to police more than 6 million factories of all kinds. As a result, sweatshops have begun to become a problem again, and violations of FLSA regulations have become rampant.

Sweatshops today are often operations that are mobile, which makes them even more hard to police and regulate. Equipment can be as minimal a just a few sewing machines. All employers need to do is rent temporary space, pay an electric bill, and they can then hire workers - often undocumented workers - and work them long hours for little pay. FLSA laws are not enforced. The DOL estimates that about half of the 22,000 garment contractors registered in the US are paid less than minimum wage, 2/3 do not receive overtime pay, and more than 1/3 work in environments with serious safety and health violations. Any workers who try to protest their poor working conditions run the risk of being fired. The DOL estimates that more than half of the 7,000 garment factories in New York City are now sweatshops. Steam from the clothing presses spews out from pipes that have been stuck out through boarded-up windows, and the buildings have locked doors.

New York isn’t the only culprit, though; sweatshops are a common fixture in other large cities that have large communities of immigrants. Los Angeles, for example, has Hispanic and Asian immigrants who often work in conditions as slaves, toiling to repay the thousands of dollars they owe to people who smuggled them inside the US. Most of the garment workers in these large cities are immigrant women who are poor. A recent example of a modern-day sweatshop came to light in 1995, when a federal raid on a sweatshop in El Monte, California, discovered 72 immigrants from Thailand who were working for $.69 per hour, were locked inside an apartment complex that was surrounded on all sides by razor wire. The workers had been threatened with being raped or killed if they stopped working.

Media coverage has resulted I public outrage about modern-day sweatshops, which has resulted in the Stop Sweatshops Act, which is now being discussed in Congress. The act defines that sweatshops have unhealthy, unsafe working conditions, which often include poor ventilation and locked exits; low wages or no pay at all; long work hours and no overtime pay; and the threat of retaliation against any workers who try to stand up for their rights. If the proposed law is passed, contractors and retailers alike would be liable for any violations, but the law has not been passed yet. Although progress is being made in ferreting out sweatshops, most of that progress is due to the media, such as when it was widely reported that the National Labor Committee had discovered that a line of clothing endorsed by Kathie Lee Gifford was being made in sweatshops in Honduras. The intense media coverage and publicity resulted in Gifford signing an agreement with the NLC, and the manufacturers agreeing to have their factories independently monitored. So the media is playing a vital role in bringing this problem to the forefront of public consciousness. Hopefully it will not be long before Congress follows their lead, and American sweatshops will be eradicated, and again be a thing of the past.