Modern Slavery: Part 1

When you think of sweatshops, you probably imagine the poor children in bad conditions in a third world country. What you don’t imagine is the travesty that is taking place today right around the corner from where you live. The poor conditions still apply and contribute to some of the very popular outlets you shop from like Wal Mart and JC Penny’s.

In 1998 the Union and Labour Department estimated that over 22000 union sewing businesses are actually sweatshops, and the number has grown within the last 11 years. The conditions that are used to define a “sweatshop” are minimum(and I mean below our minimum) wage and overtime conditions, they must break two or more laws. These shops also often include physical abuse and lack of benefits to the workers.Those who work at these shops are mostly immigrants who come to America seeking refuge and the “American dream”. The estimated number of immigrants who come to America each year is 1,000,000 a year!Instead they are overworked,abused, and the saddest part of this is that they cannot report any of this to the Better Business Bureau or any authorities for that matter, in fear that they will be deported. In 1995 the California Department of Industrial Relations led a task force into a fenced in apartment complex only to find a sweatshop with some of the most horrendous conditions. They described the workers to be in “virtual slavery”. A recent worker for the U.S. Department of Labour stated that he visited a place where some workers had not been paid for months on end and when they were paid it was merely a dollar an hour for their work in these hazardous conditions.

Image via Wikipedia

The popular outlets I mentioned are by law not responsible if they have no direct knowledge of the sweatshops. These shops have often been related to these outlets however, the outlets faced no suffrage due to them not having “direct knowledge”. (Of course these huge, successful, businesses can easily cover their steps). In 2001, 61% of clothing factories were reported to not even pay their workers minimum wage or overtime pay. The trend travels, across the nation- in the “Big Apple” 65% of clothing sewing shops were reported to not give their workers minimum wage. Many American corporations, such as Wal Mart, use sweatshops in other countries for their own benefit. For example the founding president of Wal Mart stated that they use a sweatshop in Bangladesh that only pays their workers 9 cents an hour. Wow!KLD & Co.’s Domini 400 Social Index dropped Wal Mart because they felt that they had not insured them that their vendors meet the adequate standards of human rights standards in their sources of labor. Their conditions in their overseas shops include: no health care,barely offering wages,forced overtime, and neglect, amongst other inhumanities.