Defining a Sweatshop/Overview

The United States Government Accounting Office defines a sweatshop as "an employer that violates more than one federal or state labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers' compensation, or industry registration law." 

Sweatshops were first introduced to the garment industry during the industrial revolution of the late 1800's. Like modern day sweatshops, the workers were mostly female immigrants, who worked long hours in terrible conditions at very little pay. Many people associate the term "sweatshop" with two major events in the history of United States apparel manufacturing. The first was the 1909 strike of shirtwaist factory workers, the first major strike by female workers in America. The second was the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911, which killed 146 garment workers; dangerous physical conditions are reported in many modern day factories. With help of unions and governmental legislation enacted by the New Deal, sweatshops began to decline in the 1940’s and the next several decades (7, page 86).

Unfortunately, sweatshops are not a thing of the past. Of the roughly 22,000 American garment shops operating in 2001, over half would have qualified as sweatshops according to the definition above (4). Estimates suggest there were between 144,000 to 200,000 garment workers in the United States in 2002, most of whom were female immigrants, and in many cases, were taken advantage of and treated without dignity. To understand the nature of the abuse and exploitation that still takes place in garment factories, it is necessary to look at the structure of the apparel industry, and the factors that have contributed to the “reemergence” of sweatshops. Click on the image below to learn about the hierarchical system within the garment industry, in which garment workers make up the very bottom rung.

image modifed from http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~leszekp/photo_gallery/theworld/SanFrancisco_01.jpg