How can you tell if the product you are about to purchase was made by a child, by teenaged girls forced to work until midnight seven days a week, or in a sweatshop by workers paid 9¢ an hour? The sad fact is...You cannot. The companies do not want you to know, so they hide their production behind locked factory gates, barbed wire and armed guards. Many multinationals refuse to release to the American people even the list and addresses of the factories they use around the world to make the goods we purchase. The corporations say we have no right to this information. Even the President of the United States could not find out where these companies manufacture their goods. Yet, to shop with our conscience, it is our right to know in which countries and factories, under what human rights conditions, and at what wages the products we purchase are made. This paper will be a behind the scenes look at what really happens behind the closed door of sweatshops.

The terms “sweatshop” and “sweating” were first used in the 19th century to describe a subcontracting system where the middlemen earned their profit from the margin between the amount they received from a contract

There are probably sweatshops in every country in the world - anywhere where there is a pool of desperate, exploitable workers. Logically, the poorer a country is the more exploitable its people are. Labor violations are, therefore, especially widespread in third world countries. Nike has been criticized for unethical labor practices in its Chinese, Vietnamese and Indonesian shoe factories, and Haitian garment factories. Non-profit groups have documented the labor violations of retailers like Philips-Van Heusen and the Gap in factories throughout Latin America.

and the amount they paid workers. This margin was “sweated” from the workers because they received minimal wages for excessive hours worked under unsanitary conditions (Mason, 33).

Sweatshop operators can best control a pool of workers that are ignorant of their rights as workers. Therefore, bosses often refuse to hire unionized workers and intimidate or fire any worker suspected of speaking with union representatives or trying to organize her fellow workers. In the garment industry, the typical sweatshop worker is a woman (90% of all sweatshop workers are women). She is young and, often, missing the chance for an education because she must work long hours to support a family. In America, she is often a recent or undocumented immigrant. She is almost always non-union and usually unaware that, even if she is in this country illegally, she still has rights as a worker (Taylor, 66).

Corporations have skewed priorities. Many are putting expenses like CEO salaries and advertising costs before the well being of their workers. For example, Haitian workers sewing children’s pajamas for Disney would have to toil full-time for 14.5 years to earn what Michael Eisner makes in one hour! Here's another staggering statistic: Nike could pay all its individual workers enough to feed and clothe themselves and their families if it would just devote 1% of its advertising budget to workers' salaries each year! Corporations falsely claim that they are victims of the global economy when, in fact, corporations help create and maintain this system (Femininists Against Sweatshops, 5).

The popularity of the "free" market following the fall of Communism and a rise in anti-union sentiment, coupled with government programs (like NAFTA and GATT) designed to encourage free trade, have hastened the globalization process. Large corporations are now free to seek out low-wage havens: impoverished countries where corporations benefit from oppressive dictatorial regimes that actively suppress workers' freedoms of speech and association. Even in North America, where the North American Free Trade Agreement is supposed to enforce a minimum standard for workers' rights, corporations concentrate in maquiladoras, "free trade zones" that were created by NAFTA, where the workers' rights provisions of the Agreement simply do not apply (Co-op America).

The notorious sweatshops of the age of Big Business (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) virtually disappeared after World War II because of increased government regulation of monopolies and the rise of trade unions. Sweatshops began to reappear again, however, during the 1980's and 1990's because of economic globalization. Today’s economy is described as global because advancements in technology have made it possible for large corporations that were once confined to a specific geographic location to become large "multi-nationals" (Mason, 77).

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