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Causes and effects of slavery
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The average sweatshop employee is paid as little as $1.12 an hour. (Cooper, Rob. "Inside Apple 's Chinese 'sweatshop ' Factory Where Workers Are Paid Just £1.12 per Hour to Produce IPhones and IPads for the West." N.p., n.d. Web) This amount of money is not adequate enough to match today’s standards. Retail organizations today make more than enough to supply employees for their necessities. The top retail organizations in the nation should not use third world countries to manufacture their products because economically, the companies are able to create more jobs in the U.S, also the safety hazards and abusive management are unacceptable to our standards of humanity. Mandatory 12 to 15 hour shifts six days a week to only receive $180 a month is outrageously low; even a teenager can make …show more content…
In America the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour plus overtime. (Perez, Thomas E. "Wages." U.S. Department of Labor. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Sept. 2013) This is the minimum standard set for Americans who hold a job. The reason top retail companies invest their money into sweatshops because it’s cheap labor. Sweatshops hire in the thousands paying each employee only a fraction of minimum wage. To the workers, the amount of money presented is obviously not enough, but they keep coming back due to the lack of well-paying jobs in their countries. Also in America and Europe, it’s a policy to hire individuals at a certain age and to work them for a certain amount of time. These sweatshops completely disregard these guidelines and hire children, working the same hours and being treated as every other slave in the sweatshop. Under paying and beating employees is one case, but using the same enforcements on children is a down right shame. Although it may be more expensive to buy from American companies, at least the products they produce are made with no force or
In today’s world, increasing big companies open factories in developing countries but many people said it is unethical and the factories are sweatshops. Most of the sweatshops were opened in east Asia and third-world countries and regions. The companies open the sweatshops in order to get more benefits is a kind of very irresponsible behavior. For example, Apple's factories in China are not good and unethical. Audit finds
Some of the arguments against sweatshops raised by Americans is the they take jobs away from the American people. In the job force it is becoming harder to find an open position any where. Instead of keeping the factories here the companies are shipped over seas, causing millions of job opportunities for Americans to be lost. Some arguments raised by the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) are the poor working conditions, low wages, long hours, and children in the factories. The damp, dark, and cold environment can depress the workers even more than they may be, causing rates in suicide to increase. Low wages is another concern USAS have. The workers barley get enough money to survive.
Look down at the clothes you're wearing right now, chances are almost every single thing you are currently wearing was made in a sweatshop. It is estimated that between 50-75% of all garments are made under sweatshop like conditions. Designers and companies get 2nd party contractors to hire people to work in these factories, this is a tool to make them not responsible for the horrendous conditions. They get away with it by saying they are providing jobs for people in 3rd world countries so its okay, but in reality they are making their lives even worse. These companies and designers only care about their bank accounts so if they can exploit poor, young people from poverty stricken countries they surely will, and they do. A sweatshop is a factory
Large corporations such as Nike, Gap, and Reebok and many others from the United States have moved their factories to undeveloped nations; barely pay their employees enough to live on. Countries such as China, Indonesia, and Haiti have readily abundant cheap labor. There should be labor laws or an obligation of respecting workers to provide decent working conditions, fair wages, and safety standards.
What do we think of when we hear the word sweatshop? Many people associate that word with female immigrant workers, who receive very minimal pay. The work area is very dangerous to your health and is an extremely unsanitary work place. The work area is usually overcrowded. That is the general stereotype, in my eyes of a sweatshop. All if not more of these conditions were present in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. This company was located in New York City at 23-29 Washington Place, in which 146 employees mainly women and girls lost their lives to a disastrous fire. “A superficial examination revealed that conditions in factories and manufacturing establishments that developed a daily menace to the lives of the thousands of working men, women, and children” (McClymer 29). Lack of precautions to prevent fire, inadequate fire-escape facilities, unsanitary conditions were undermining the health of the workers.
What are sweatshops? The Miriam-Webster dictionary defines sweatshops as: A shop or factory in which employees work for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions. These factories are mainly located in Third-World countries, although there are still a few in the United States. Many popular, name brand companies like Nike, use sweatshops around the world. Today there is much controversy about sweatshops and whether they should be banned and closed. In reality, the conditions of these factories are terrible. The employees are paid very little, even after working long, hard hours. The supervisors of these shops are often cruel, malicious, and brutal. Sadly, these factories are often the only source of income for Third-World workers. As bad as these sweatshops might be, they have pulled many countries and individuals out of poverty. So, are sweatshops beneficial?
The lives of people in some third world countries such as Honduras and Indonesia are completely different than ours hear in a much more prosperous nation. So when citizens of this great nation hear about people working for thirty to fifty cents an hour they think it’s absolutely absurd. But what they don’t realize is that this amount of profit is acceptable to these people. David R. Henderson backs this up by stating, “Take the 31 cents an hour some 13-year-old Honduran girls allegedly earn at 70-hour-a-week jobs. Assuming a 50-week year, that works out to over $1,000 a year. This sounds absurdly low to Americans but when you consider that Honduras’s GDP per person in 1994 was the equivalent of about $600.” You can also see proof of this in Cathy Young’s article when she writes, “I have also wondered why, when we are shocked by reports of 50-cent-an-hour wages, we never think of those Save the Children ads reminding us that a contribution of $15 can feed and clothe a Third World child for a whole month.” Also, Young brings up another good point by stressing the fact that to many Third World country families having children is one more financial burden, “…in poor societies, a family cannot afford to support a child for 18 years. For virtually all of human history, most children worked…”
Sweatshops are factories that violate two or more human rights. Sweatshops are known in the media and politically as dangerous places for workers to work in and are infamous for paying minimum wages for long hours of labour. The first source is a quote that states that Nike has helped improve Vietnamese’s’ workers lives by helping them be able to afford luxuries they did not have access to before such as scooters, bicycles and even cars. The source is showing sweatshops in a positive light stating how before sweatshops were established in developing countries, Vietnamese citizens were very poor and underprivileged. The source continues to say that the moment when sweatshops came to Vietnam, workers started to get more profit and their lives eventually went uphill from their due to being able to afford more necessities and luxuries; one of them being a vehicle, which makes their commute to work much faster which in turn increases their quality of life. The source demonstrates this point by mentioning that this is all due to globalization. Because of globalization, multinationals are able to make investments in developing countries which in turn offers the sweatshops and the employees better technology, better working skills and an improvement in their education which overall helps raise the sweatshops’ productivity which results in an increase
Americans do not realize the amount of clothing we wear on a daily basis is actually made in Cambodia, such as Adidas and even the Gap. The women that work for these sweatshops in Cambodia sew for 50 cents an hour, which is what allows stores in America, such as H&M to sell inexpensive clothing (Winn, 2015). The conditions these Cambodian workers face are a noisy, loud, and extremely hot environment where people are known for having huge fainting attacks. When workers were on strike a year ago, authorities actually shot multiple people just because they were trying to raise their pay. There is plenty of evidence of abuse captured through many interviews of workers from different factories, and is not just a rarity these places see often or hear of. Factories hire children, fire pregnant women because they are slow and use the bathroom to much, scream at regular workers if they use the toilet more than two times a day, scam hard working employees with not paying them their money they worked for and more, and workers are sent home and replaced if 2,000 shirts are not stitched in one day. Expectations are unrealistic and not suitable for employees to be working each day for more than ten
These millionaires and billionaires have different intentions they want to make more money and save money as well like in sweatshops. They send manufacturing jobs overseas where they can pay people less than a dollar an hour in unsuitable conditions. "In developing countries, an estimated 168 million children ages 5 to 14 are forced to work."(DoSomething.Org). From personal knowledge learned of being an American, children must be at least the age of 16 with consent from a parent to work. But even then you can only work so many hours at that age.” At least 21 workers died and 50 were hurt when a fire swept through a Bangladeshi factory making clothes for budget retailer H&M and other firms as they worked at night to fulfill orders."(Martin Hickman) Sweatshops are very dangerous places to work in due to lack of safety precautions: for example fire extinguishers, exit doors, and stairs
One of the major reasons people believe sweatshops are harmful is because they pay very little for grueling labor. From the perspective of most Americans, the equivalent of two dollars a day seems cruel, but when compared
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight, and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived, and died in cotton fields, and sweatshops.”- Stephen Jay Gould. Sweatshops exploit people, and children. They take advantage of their poverty, and there need, for a better life. Sweatshops are one of the worst things that ever happened to the business world, and poor people around the world. Sweatshops should be stopped, and ended.
Sweatshop companies argue that they are creating jobs and helping people to improve their financial standard but the reality is they don’t improve people’s financial standard instead industries just use people’s poverty to maximize their profit margin. Globalexchange.org restates the statement of National Labour Committee as mentioned below. “According to the National Labor Committee, a worker in El Salvador earns about 24 cents for each NBA jersey she makes. These same jerseys then sell in the U.S. for $140 each. The 60 cents an hour the Salvadoran NBA seamstresses earn covers only about a third of the cost of living, and even the Salvadoran government says this wage leaves a worker in “abject poverty.”
Children in these factories are making less than two to three dollars a day. According to Nike Pledges to End Child Labor And Apply U.S. Rules Abroad Mr.Knight states, “ Nike and other American companies pay workers in China and Vietnam less than two dollars a day and workers in Indonesia less than one dollar a day.” Also according to Media Benjamin, director of the San Francisco based human rights group Global Exchange, Media states, “ A sweatshop is a sweatshop is a sweatshop unless you start paying a living wage. That would be three dollars a day.”
These concerns typically include the rights of the children, the responsibility of the parents and employers, and the well-being and safety of the children. In Stefan Spath’s “The Virtues of Sweatshops,” it is made very clear that he, like many others, feel that the general public is highly misinformed on what sweatshops are and what they actually contribute to their respective communities. In the eyes of someone from a developed country, sweatshops and child labor that takes place in them seem primitive and are interpreted as simply a means by which companies can spend less money on employers. He states that when labor unions claim that companies which establish operations in developing nations create unemployment in America, they aren’t really explaining the whole story. The author claims that those who are adamantly protest sweatshops are only telling half the story with a claim like this. He points out in this part that the American people can rest assured that high skilled jobs will not be taken over to developing countries because “– high-skilled jobs require a level of worker education and skills that poorer countries cannot