We Shop, They Sweat: The Women Who Make Our Clothes

To get to Molly and Angeline’s “sweatshop,” you had to climb seven flights of steep, concrete steps. It was a daunting task after a night of drinking and dancing in the Big Apple. But what I remember most about these late night climbs was not the gluteal burn, but the women still working in the garment factory on the sixth floor.

The girls jokingly nicknamed their loft “the sweatshop” because they didn’t think the cramped concrete room below them, filled with young foreign women sewing shirts, was one. But I’m not so sure. According to the Department of Labor, 50 percent of U.S. garment factories are sweatshops.  This could have been one of them.

A sweatshop, by Webster’s definition, is “a shop or factory in which employees work for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions.” Although they were common in the United States during the turn of the century, sweatshops were mostly eradicated as unions organized and labor practices improved. But they are no longer a thing of the past. Due to globalization and free trade, sweatshops are a common, if not prevalent, occurrence in countries with poor, exploitable labor.

Although this type of labor exists everywhere, including the United States, many transnational corporations seek out developing countries to sew their threads. With fewer governmental labor restrictions and an endless supply of desperate workers, large corporations are able to overlook human rights abuses by shipping them abroad.

Although proponents of free trade and globalization purport that multinational corporations provide jobs and a future to people that would otherwise not have any, exposés of factory conditions provide quite a different picture.

One such exposé is Micha Peled’s documentary China Blue. Shot clandestinely in a Chinese garment factory, it follows the journey of Jasmine, a teenage girl who leaves her rural home and finds employment in a denim garment factory that exports to overseas companies. Inside the factory, workers, most of them female, live twelve to a room, and work excruciatingly long hours. They suffer pay cuts for food, hot water, and leaving the compound. The women earn approximately 6 cents an hour and receive one paycheck every two months. The viewer is left wondering if these desperate young women are actually making any money at all.