Sweat-shops

Sweatshop (or sweat factory) is a pejorative term for a workplace that has very poor, socially unacceptable working conditions. The work may be difficult, dangerous, climatically challenged or underpaid. Workers in sweatshops may work long hours with low pay, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage; child labor laws may also be violated. The Fair Labor Association's "2006 Annual Public Report" inspected factories for FLA compliance in 18 countries including Bangladesh, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, China, India, Vietnam, Honduras, Indonesia, Brazil, Taiwan, Mexico, and the U.S. The U.S. Department of Labor's "2015 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor" found that "18 countries did not meet the International Labor Organization's recommendation for an adequate number of inspectors."

A sweatshop is a factory or workshop, especially in the clothing industry, where manual workers are employed at very low wages for long hours under poor conditions and many health risks.

Many workplaces through history have been crowded, low-paying and without job security; but the concept of a sweatshop originated between 1830 and 1850 as a specific type of workshop in which a certain type of middleman, the sweater, directed others in garment making (the process of producing clothing) under arduous conditions. The terms sweater for the middleman and sweat system for the process of subcontracting piecework were used in early critiques like Charles Kingsley's Cheap Clothes and Nasty, written in 1850, which described conditions in London, England. The workplaces created for the sweating system, a system of subcontracting in the tailoring trade were called sweatshops and might contain only a few workers or as many as 100 and more.

Between 1850 and 1900, sweatshops attracted the rural poor to rapidly growing cities, and attracted immigrants to places such as London and New York City's garment district, located near the tenements of New York's Lower East Side. These sweatshops incurred criticism: labour leaders cited them as crowded, poorly ventilated, and prone to fires and rat infestations: in many cases, there were many workers crowded into small tenement rooms.

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