SWEATSHOP WORKER

An employee who is subject to extreme exploitation, including long work hours, low wages and brutal repression of labour organization, and whose place of work, the factory or sweatshop, involves an insalubrious and hazardous environment.

"In 150 countries around the world, over 2 million people, many of them young women and teenagers, work in garment sweatshops producing for American retailers. […] Long hours and mandatory overtime cost sweatshop workers time spent with their families. Dangerous and unhealthy conditions cost sweatshop workers their health and sometimes their lives. Poverty wages cost the children of sweatshop workers the nutrition they need to grow and learn. Repression of those who speak out against their conditions costs sweatshop workers their freedom. Factories that close because apparel retailers have moved on to another location with even lower wages cost workers their jobs and livelihoods."
(Behind the Label, U.S Retailers: Responsible for the Global Sweatshop Crisis, visited 2011-09-16)

Sweatshops are factories or shops where work conditions are substantially below accepted standards, characterized by low wages, long hours, an unsanitary environment and often, child labour. Sweatshops are most common in the garment industry and raids by Occupational Safety and Health officials on shops in the Los Angeles area exploiting immigrant Asians are evidence that the practice was alive and well at least as recently as the late 20th century. The term originated in the early 20th century, where in certain areas, garment factories gathered many workers together in one small room, under poor light, and with little provision made for ventilation or sanitation.

‘Sweating' refers to the system of subcontracting in which competing manufacturers consign work to competing contractors. Sweating is endemic to the garment industry because of its division of labor, separating the craft processes of design, marketing and cutting from the labor-intensive sewing and finishing.