Sweatshops
In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company building went up in flames, and one hundred and forty six young female workers' lives came to an end. The New York legislature was forced to pass laws regulating the work hours and conditions, marking one of the first steps to decrease sweatshop labor. In the past decade, several associations all around the world have successfully aided the fight to reduce corporations' use of sweatshops. Competition causes big businesses to strive for the best profit, and the labor source rarely impedes upon their financial system, because sweatshop labor is cheap labor. With the help of committees like USAS, NLC, and SCALE, people are becoming informed of the horrible sweatshop conditions, and they are organizing coalitions to end the worker misuse and abuse.What exactly makes a factory qualify as a sweatshop? By direct quote of an encyclopedia, a sweatshop is a "workplace where conditions are oppressive and unhealthy and where there is unchecked exploitation of workers" (Sweatshops 435). Sweatshop labor includes many unjust practices, with a mass of unskilled and unorganized laborers, as well as ignorance of poor working conditions. The imperfect systems of management te
They build solidarity by informing others, and their progress in the recent years has greatly improved. Other organizations have just as much success as USAS. High school students can also get involved with the aid of SCALE, the Student Committee Against Labor Exploitation. High schools operate this committee out of New York, and they work towards awareness in teenagers about child labor and sweatshop abuses. Volunteers at the NLC created this committee as the equivalent of the USAS for secondary school students. Although this organization just started, the members organize The United Students Against Sweatshops, or USAS, is a distinctive anti-sweatshop group dedicated to making an impact. The USAS acts as an international student movement of campuses and individual students fighting for sweatshop free labor conditions and workers' rights (United 1). Members get involved with the school board and negotiate with administrators to make sure their college products are not Sweatshops still exist today for many reasons. Corporate greed follows a clear pattern. Companies hire subcontractors for factories in countries where regulations are insubstantial and labor-operating costs are the lowest. Frequently, some countries are forced to resort to sweatshop labor as a necessity to increase their economy. Governments and international trade agencies, like the World Trade Organization, create trade laws and lending policies that require developing countries to support their economies. To accomplish this requirement, these countries must create export industries, and as a result, they ignore the problem of social injustice (Why 1). Third world countries need the foreign money, and therefore sweatshop labor continues to exist. Sweatshops have existed for over one hundred years. Complaints of sweatshop labor began in the 1860s, when the wives of civil war soldiers were employed to make uniforms. During the 1880s, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe provided an immense amount of cheap labor. The problems of low wages and harmful conditions greatly increased during the twentieth century industrialization period, and the amount of sweatshops exploded in Latin America and Asia. However, with the rise in sweatshop labor, the public awareness grew as well. The victories against Gap and Nike are only a small step towards ending unfair labor practices within corporation
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1614
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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