In the worst forms of sweatshops people are forced to work up to 72 hours straight, without sleep. Those complaining are beaten and abused. Cases of physical, sexual, and verbal abuse are common and well documented. Children as young as 6 have been found working in sweatshops for up to 16 hours per day.
Products that are commonly produced in sweatshops include clothing, shoes, toys, electronics, carpets, chocolate, coffee. Products from sweatshops are exported on a large scale. Look for fair trade labeled products.
Fair trade labels ensure higher salaries and better working conditions as well as higher social and environmental standards. Most consumers are willing to pay a little more to make sure their t-shirt is not made in a sweatshop under very poor conditions. The actual cost to consumers to double wages would be a mere 1. The brands trying to sell you a shirt are not exactly advertising their sweatshop production conditions when you are in the store.
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Shop Support. In developing countries, an estimated million children aged between 5 to 14 years are forced to work in apparel factories. Most apparel factories have unguarded machinery, exposed electrical wiring, very little ventilation, no temperature control, insufficient lighting, and unsanitary bathrooms. Some employers force women to take birth control and routine pregnancy tests to avoid having to give them maternity leave or provide them with appropriate health benefits.
This is equivalent to 3 shifts at a minimum-paying job in North America. An apparel worker in a sweatshop has to work 70 hours per week in order to earn the equivalent of the average income for their country. According to sweatshop statistics, if the salary of sweatshop workers was to be doubled, the consumer cost of an item would increase by 1.
Sweatshop facts indicate that in , more than 11, sweatshops in the U. Sweatshop laborers can be forced to work continuously for 48 hours straight without any breaks, including bathroom and lunch breaks. Only sleep breaks are allowed. Sweatshop wages are so little that people who are forced to work in them must spend the majority of their paycheck on food for their families to survive. The workers remain so poor that they have no choice but to keep going back to the sweatshops.
Other than the sweatshop workers, cotton farmers also work under very poor conditions to satisfy the demand of consumers for cheap clothing.
They work in highly hazardous conditions to produce cotton for the sweatshops. Sweatshops are defined as small manufacturing establishments employing workers under unfair and unsanitary working conditions. In the U. Sweatshops are bad because they often promote child labor, offer unfair wages, have poor working conditions, unreasonable working hours, and offer no benefits for workers.
Though this is the first time Wang has dealt with a case of mass n-hexane poisoning, he has been at this for 20 years.
Given that Chinese factories often scrimp on safety to save money, there is no shortage of work-related personal injury cases. The Wintek workers found Wang because his firm handled an unrelated n-hexane case a few years ago.
Use of n-hexane is legal in China, but requires special safety equipment and government permission that Wintek did not get. And though they have been waiting for months in the local hospital for their court cases to crawl through the system, the Suzhou factory workers are relatively lucky. There were roughly 14, new cases of workplace-caused illness in China in , according to government statistics, but many more cases went undocumented because the process is so complex and cumbersome, particularly for migrant workers who make up the bulk of factory workforces.
Illness often manifests years after the work was done, and creating a paper trail that traces back to a company can be near impossible. Huge multinational companies like Apple, he says, should ultimately be held responsible when workers making their parts get sick on the job.
A mystery illness in Suzhou.
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