Sweatshops

Over the last decade, statistics show that sweatshops are on the rise. Many people believe that sweatshops in the United States were abolished in the late 1930's, but contrary to common belief, sweatshops are still very prevalent in large U.S. cities. Most sweatshops operate in Los Angeles, California and New York City due to the high number of immigrants that reside in those cities. There are also sweatshops in U.S. territories such as American Samoa and Saipan. Garments made in these location carry the "Made in the U.S." tag, which trick consumers into thinking that the clothing is made "sweat" free.

The term "sweating" originated in the late 1800's, due to the contracting system. The garment industry is like a pyramid with the contractors in the middle. Retailers are on top and garment workers are at the bottom of the pyramid. The pyramid has retailers on top, followed by manufacturers, then contractors or sub-contractors and finally, garment workers. The retailers set a low price, which they are willing to pay to the manufactures, and then the manufactures demand a lower price from factories. As a result, the factories are forced to "sweat" profits out of the garment workers in order to keep up with demands (Crisis or Opportunity).

According to Sweatshop Watch, a sweatshop is " a workplace that violates the law and where workers are subject to: extreme exploitation, poor working conditions, arbitrary discipline, such as verbal and physical abuse, and [where supervisors provoke] fear and intimidation." There are curtain characteristics that mark a garment factory as a sweatshop. These characteristics are if a factory is/has a fire hazard, electrical hazard, safety hazard, health hazard, structural dangers, wage violations, child labor, industrial homework, registration violations, and tax irregularities (Levine p.142-3). No one characteristic is common to a sweatshop, but instead a sweatshop has several of these characteristics.

Sweatshops started in the late 1800's due to the Industrial Revolution. In 1901, a New York cloak maker made an average of nine dollars a week for a six-day working week, fourteen to fifteen hours a day. Most of these garment workers, worked in tenements, which were vulnerable to fires and diseases, such as smallpox, and tuberculosis (Levine p. 138). It was not until 1911 that sweatshops started to be made public.

In March 25, 1911, a fire broke out in a New York factory that claimed 146 garment workers' lives, 125 of these workers were girls who either died in the fire or jumped from the ten-story building. The building only had one emergency exist and the walls in the factory were fire proof. The fire took place in only three floors: eighth, ninth, and tenth floor (New York Times). This factory disaster made headline news all over the nation, which caused political leaders to take action.

As a result, in 1938, as part of President Roosevelt's New Deal, The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was created. This law presents minimum wage and overtime compensation standards. It banns any type of child labor by declaring a minimum working age (Garment Worker Center). As workers started to feel empowered by these newly generated laws, many sweatshops were wiped out. Garment workers started to unionize and demand more respect. Consequently, contractors were forced to seek cheaper labor in other countries. However, in the 1960's the American labor movement was weakening and sweatshops started to reappear and are still present till this day.

Sweatshops returned to the public eye, on August of 1995 when an El Monte, California sweatshop was raided. The California state labor officials found seventy-one Thai immigrated, sixty-seven women and four men, which were locked up in an apartment complex surrounded by barbed wire and spiked fences. The workers worked for about 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, for seventy cents an hour (Levine p.142). These types of conditions were unthinkable for a U.S. garment factory. Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich said, "[It's] the worst case of slavery in America's recent history (Julie Sue)."

All the workers in the El Monte factory were smuggled into the U.S. with misleading promises. Rojana Cheunchujit, one of the seventy-one garment workers, said that "When [she] was in Thailand this person came to the village to recruit people to work at the shop in El Monte. He told [her] that the pay was very good. He said that if [she] wanted to come to the US, he would be able to arrange it for [her] for 125,000 baht [US $5,000] which [she] paid (Louie p.236). When she arrived to the US in 1994, she was charged an additional $4,800 to cover for the transportation. They told her that she would not be able to leave until that debt was paid, which basically chained her to the factory. After about a year of abuse, Rojana and the other garment workers were rescued, but unfortunately their problems didn't end there. They were then faced with the possibility of deportation, which was the last thing they wanted. The INS, who did not oppose deportation, was in charge of their case but fortunately for the garment workers, many unions were keeping track of the case. They threatened the INS with making their plans public. The INS was then forced to release them. The organizations that helped liberate them also helped them get stabilized in the US. Rojana still is still employed by a garment factory, but she only works eight to nine hours a day. She is also a member of the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocate, KIWA (Louie p. 241-2). The El Monte raid opened many people's eyes, yet we are still struggling to eradicate modern day sweatshops.

In Los Angeles County alone, the apparel industry officially employs about 120,000 people, but in actuality the number is much higher because of factories that operate underground (Bonacich p. 460). It is believed that one-fifth of LA's apparel factories operate underground. Los Angeles is seen as the capital of garment production in the United States because apparel in California is a $24.3 billion industry (Crisis or Opportunity). Most of the sweatshops in Los Angeles County are made of immigrant workers from Latin America and Asia. In the end of 1996, there were 9.6 million Latinas in the United States (Louie p.65). Most sewing machine operators are often jobs taken by minorities. Mexicans make up 52%, 16% are Central American, 7% are other Latinos, and 13% are Asian workers (Bonacich p 462). Some of the major apparel manufactures that hire these factories are: Guess, Bugle Boy, Rampage, Carole Little, Chorus Line, and BCBG.

These manufactures, willingly or not force contractors to violate wage laws. Typically, most garment workers get paid at a piece rate,