the.com/sweatshop
where your cheap shirt costs someone else everything they had to give.
means A factory or workshop where people labor long hours for low pay under harsh, often dangerous conditions.
from From "sweat" plus "shop," but the key word is the older sense of "sweater" — not the garment, but a middleman who "sweated" his workers, squeezing maximum labor for minimum wages. The verb "to sweat" had meant "to extract by hard pressure" for centuries; by the mid-1800s it described this brutal subcontracting system, and "sweatshop" followed soon after to name the cramped rooms where the sweating was done.
- origin
- Term coined in 1850s for piecework done in cramped rooms
- the fire
- Triangle Shirtwaist blaze killed 146 behind locked doors
- hidden math
- Workers often earn cents per garment sold for hundreds
- global ghost
- Estimated tens of millions still labor in them today
- sweating system
- Named for middlemen who squeezed wages from workers
rana plaza collapse — garment factory in bangladesh, 1,134 deaths in 2013
foxconn factories — electronics manufacturer in shenzhen, china, 300,000+ workers
fast fashion bangladesh — garment industry employs 4 million workers in dangerous conditions