Sweatshops

Sweatshop (or sweat factory) is a pejorative term for a workplace that has poor, socially unacceptable working conditions. The work may be difficult, dangerous, 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. According to the Fair Labor Association, at least 18 countries are operating sweatshops, including Bangladesh, Romania, Costa Rica, El Salvador, China, the Dominican Republic, India, Vietnam, Honduras, Indonesia, Armenia, Brazil, Haiti, Taiwan, the Ivory Coast, Nicaragua, Mexico, the United States and its territories.

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

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.

In the 1890s, a group calling itself the National Anti-Sweating League was formed in Melbourne and campaigned successfully for a minimum wage via trade boards. A group with the same name campaigned from 1906 in the UK, resulting in the Trade Boards Act 1909.

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