Sweatshop is a factory where people living in poverty, mostly women and children, work long hours for low wages. Working conditions are often bad enough to endanger the health and safety of the workers.
The sweatshop, often called the sweating system, began when the factory system developed in the early 1800’s. Many factories were too small to house all the workers. So factory owners assigned part of the work to subcontractors. The subcontractors set up makeshift factories in dimly lighted and poorly ventilated buildings. They hired workers on a piecework basis. Each worker’s pay was based on the number of product units he or she completed. Nearly all industrialized countries had sweatshops.
In the United States, people began to object to sweatshops as early as 1830. The problem became serious after 1880. At that time, the rate of immigration to the United States increased. Sweatshop owners took advantage of immigrants’ ignorance and poverty to get them to work for low wages. The cigar and needlework industries in particular relied heavily on the sweating system. Some mechanical industries did so as well.
In the 1900’s, some northern European nations began to pass laws prohibiting sweatshop conditions. Many states of the United States passed such laws after a fire in 1911 killed 146 workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City. States also passed minimum-wage laws that made it impractical for factories to assign work to subcontractors. Laws that abolished child labor and limited the hours women could work also hurt the sweatshop system. In addition, more women took jobs in metalworking and other trades. In these trades, laborers could not work outside the regular factories.
By the 1990’s, some sweatshops reappeared in the United States, especially in Saipan—one of the Northern Mariana Islands—and in other U.S. territories overseas. The shops employed mainly immigrants, some of whom lacked work permits or other necessary documents. Sweatshops reappeared in northern Europe as well. They also sprang up in some Asian and Latin American nations, even where they were illegal. A number of these shops supplied clothing, shoes, toys, and other products to American companies for sale in the United States. Student protesters, human rights groups, and labor leaders campaigned to end sweatshops.
