Sweatshops and Related Issues

Sweatshops and related issues

Sweatshops are factories or other working spaces with terrible working conditions and unfairly treated workers. Usually, the working environment of sweatshops could be extremely hard for workers, such as unacceptable temperature, very loud noise, unbearable smell, exposure to hazardous materials, and robot-like motion during the work. The workers in sweatshops are often required to work long hours for very low salaries, which are unjustified and not enough to cover the basic living expenses, such as nutrition, shelter, energy, clothing, education, and transportation. Sometimes, the child workers are also hired in sweatshops.

There are a lot of issues around the sweatshops from both legal and ethical perspectives.

1) The sweatshops could be illegal because of the violation of the Human Rights Act. According to article 23 and article 24 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, employer should provide workers with safety working conditions, reasonable limitation of working hours, and periodic holidays with pay. Besides, in order to protect children, the employers are not allowed to hire child workers.

2) The sweatshops are also criticized by some people because of their exploiting nature. The employers are considered to be unethical because they didn't treat workers fairly. However, employers believe that it is justified, because they helped the poor workers by providing them working opportunities. Furthermore, they improved the local economy by setting up community services. In their opinion, they are just trying to be responsible for shareholders by cutting down the salary to save production costs.

The position in the article - "Sweatshops, Poverty is Awesome"

According to the author of the first article - "Sweatshops, Poverty is Awesome", sweatshops, by their very nature, are set up to exploit workers and local economy without any intention to help them out of poverty.

* At the very beginning, the employers choose the areas with record unemployment to build sweatshops so that local workers have no other choices but to accept the very low salaries and benefits.

* During the operation, the employers undertake any precaution to ensure the local community's economy is always dependent on the sweatshops for survival so that the sweatshops could always have the upper hand in the negotiation.

* Sweatshops provide inadequate and low-cost community services to substitute the government institutions in order to further kidnap the local economy.

* Whenever employers find more optimal locations to open new sweatshops, they will abandon the existing ones, lay off all workers, and probably destroy local economy. However, they don't care so much because such practices will increase profits and benefit shareholders.

The position in the article - "A Few Kind Words for Sweatshops"

The author of the second article has some different views towards sweatshops. He believes the sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause. Banning sweatshops will close off the route out of poverty for poor