In some sweatshops, phony time cards are maintained to deceive government inspectors. This time card, along with others seized by U. Department of Labor investigators, shows an employee working eight hours a day. Further investigation revealed that she actually worked much longer hours. Despite the Immigration Reform and Control Act of , which extended amnesty to illegal aliens residing in the United States, the number of undocumented Latino and Asian immigrants is estimated to be growing by , annually.
Some exploitative garment contractors use the threat of Immigration and Naturalization Service INS deportation to keep workers from reporting health, safety, and wage code violations. A few contractors have even been known to turn in their own employees to the INS to avoid paying them their wages. Relations between sweatshop workers and managers are often complex. Not simply cases of victims versus oppressors, these relationships are also structured around community values, ethnicity, and business circumstances.
Tensions are often greatest when owners and workers are not of the same community. Translation: Skirt-pant factory seeking one pocket setter, seeking one zipper setter, seeking two regular lock-stitch operators, 88 Eldridge Street, fifth floor. She does not pay minimum wage, but she serves her workers tea. She makes them work until midnight, but she drives them home afterward.
She uses child laborers, but she fusses over them, combing their ponytails, admiring their painted fingernails, even hugging them. By the s, sweatshop production faded under the influence of strong labor organizations, government regulations, changing immigration patterns, and the shift by manufacturers from small contract shops to large factories. In the s, manufacturers began moving away from factory production. Focusing primarily on design, brand-name advertising, and distribution, they left the bulk of actual production to an army of contractors in the United States and abroad.
In this environment, sweatshops re-emerged. Foreign competition and production rocked the apparel industry as the economic boom of the s began to fade. In the late s, American companies began to shift their production abroad to lower labor costs and secure a more compliant, non-union work force.
Despite increases in U. Foreign governments used the prospect of radically lower wages to entice U. Enticed by convenience and broader selections, many American consumers have switched allegiance from small local retail shops to national chains and mega-retailers. Prices of goods fell significantly as these large retailers responded to consumer demand for lower prices. In turn, stores pressured manufacturers and contractors to lower their costs, creating a cost-cutting spiral that sometimes led to sweatshops.
Computerized tracking of store sales lets retailers reorder merchandise as goods are sold, eliminating the need to maintain large inventories and promoting domestic production. Many large department stores and retail chains lower their costs by directly contracting the production of clothes that they sell under their own private labels.
These huge orders are too attractive to refuse but too large for any one contractor to fill, so portions are subcontracted out to other shops. Sweatshop abuses often occur in poorly supervised contract shops. Areas of activity include socially responsible investment, workplace monitoring, government regulation and enforcement, unionization, and consumer-awareness campaigns. As in the past, some approaches have been highly successful and others have yielded minimal results. Some concerned citizens engaged in consumer boycotts; others encouraged shareholders to take action.
Activists and concerned citizens seeking to curb sweatshop production have copied some of the tactics pioneered in the fight against racism in South Africa. Beginning in the late s, many institutional and individual investors battled apartheid by divesting the stock they owned in companies doing business in South Africa. Although the resolution did not pass, it received surprisingly strong shareholder support 39 million shares or 8. Subsequently, Disney pledged to issue and post a contractor code of conduct and authorize audits and inspections of all contract facilities.
Disney garment contractor H. Sweatshops primarily exist in order to cut costs associated with production and manufacturing. One of the most common labor violations in domestic sweatshops is wage and benefits violations: many of these immigrants are underpaid and overworked, paid well below the minimum wage, and working long, double-digit shifts without any overtime pay.
Further, some of the most egregious sweatshops utilize human trafficking to employ cheap labor that essentially is paid slave wages. Cutting production costs allow retailers to sell products at either a higher profit margin or in higher quantities — allowing them to maximize profits for the benefit of their owners. Unfortunately, nearly all of the most popular, well-known brands in the United States employ sweatshops to some degree to produce their goods.
Companies such as Forever 21 , Ross, and TJ Maxx have been major offenders in regards to utilizing sweatshops located in the United States. In fact, many of these apparel retailers have sweatshops located in Los Angeles.
Sweatshops, by definition, are any factories that break labor laws. In that regard, sweatshops are considered illegal in the United States. Unfortunately, the consequences for breaking such labor laws is often not enough of a deterrent to prevent sweatshops from existing. However, this law only enables workers employed by sweatshops to seek back wages against the owners of the factories. Many retailers who use sweatshops hide behind multiple middlemen in a convoluted supply chain, allowing them to avoid any accountability for their involvement.
In any case where we have learned that a third-party vendor may have violated the law, we take appropriate action available to us to encourage the vendor to help resolve issues and to improve compliance, in order to promote appropriate working conditions for employees of that vendor.
Maxx, based in Framingham, Mass. A spokeswoman for Nordstrom in Seattle said the company has reached out to DOL to learn more about its findings. The sad truth is that we have bad actors all over the world. He said companies often take a risk-based approach on monitoring and allocating resources for it. Whereas you might deploy greater resources to territories where you think the risk is higher, lower-risk territories ought not to be completely ignored. But he did note that based on his experience in the field over the last couple of decades there has been real improvement in working conditions in garment factories.
Obviously because they are in the U. I think it is better when you have your own people to see it firsthand. There is not a concern, for example, that anything will be lost in translation. For instance, a U. Weil said the meetings with retailers are in the early stages, but believes officials are changing the nature of the discussion by documenting the underlying issue of pricing.
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