ASK ME ABOUT SWEATSHOPS
By definition sweatshops are factories or workshop oftentimes located in third world countries where the people are employed at very low wages for very long hours and work under poor conditions. What do most Sweatshops do though? They are most known for the clothing industry. Sweatshops are all over the world but mostly found in Central America, South America, Asia, China, India and some parts of Europe.
What inspired me to choosing this topic was when I was in 8th grade my math teacher, Teacher Vinh would alway start a unit in math by introducing a problem we had in our world. For one of the units we learned about Sweatshops, his goal, besides teaching us math was for us to understand where all of our clothes and shoes come from and to remember that there is someone that is suffering behind the stuff we own. I remember in class he wore his favorite pair of Nikes and in class he said something more so like “You guys are probably going to think i’m crazy for doing this, but i’m going to write on my shoes to honor all the people who worked hard to make theses shoes for me.” By the end of the unit we learned that as consumers it’s hard to stop buying the items you want but the ultimate goal that we all learned was to now think of the people behind the items we buy.
This issue is significant because it’s simply isn’t fair for a human to be treated as if they aren’t people. A huge problem with sweatshops is not only how they treat their workers horribly and pay them horribly but they also support child labor. I read this article about a girl named Meem working in a Bangladesh sweatshop and she told her story to reporters. Meem is a young thirteen year old girl that was taken out of school so she could work at a sweatshop sewing and making clothes. Meem had no choice but to work at a sweatshop because the family had ran into a hardship. Her mother was pregnant and unable to work, the family needed another person to bring home something. In every country that has sweatshops the workers all get paid differently but in Meem’s experience all workers would works around 12 hours with only a lunch break, by the end of the moth they make a total of $23. “It was back-breaking, it was finger-numbing. It was particularly rage-inducing,” said Meem.
Where did sweatshops originate from? In England as early as the 1850s, the word sweater was used to describe an employer who worked many long hours for very low wages. Then the word “Sweating” was spreaded in the 1880s when immigrants from eastern and southern Europe provided a cheap labour in The United States and Central Europe. In the 20th century we saw sweatshops come into parts of Latin America and Asia and have been having a increasing demand of consumer goods in the West.
Throughout my research I have learned some of my favorite companies endorus child labor. A few companies I found were Nestle, H&M, Philip Morris, Walmart, Victoria Secret, the GAP, Apple, Disney, Forever 21 and Hershey’s. Though all theses companies will deny endorsing child labor however it’s a cheap way for them to make a lot of money off of these kids while paying them no more than $20 a month. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimated that 250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen work in developing countries. 61% in Asia, 32% in Africa and 7% in Latin America. In Indonesia, workers earn about $3.70 for a pair of shoes that later sells worldwide in store for about $180.
Many of these children are forced to work. They are denied an education and will never know what a normal childhood is. Many of the children are often beaten if they don't work fast enough. Some are denied the right to leave the workplace and go home to their families. Some are even abducted and forced to work. Most children working at sweatshops are as young as 8 to 14 years of age. A lot of the stores we love to shop at hide things from us. For example in 2013 at a Bangladeshi sweatshop, 1,100 workers died in a building collapse in the Rana Plaza. This would have never happened if the workers never physically forced to enter the dangerously cracked building which was run by gang members.
I’m still learning about my topic and it saddens me when I find out more and more about my topic, but I don’t just want to teach my teachers and classmates about sweatshops. I want to spread the word about the truth of sweatshops and actually make my peers think about the everyday items that they’re buying and ask themselves, ‘Where was this made?, Who made this? How are they being treated? If they aren’t being treated fairly how can I help so they can get their human rights back?
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