Ben
Oliveri
9/22/2014
Blog
Post 1
Professor
McCormack
Sweatshops
in the World
The
sad and unfortunate truth about sweatshops is that not only do they still exist
to this day, but they are becoming more and more prominent. That means more
young children working, more families working tirelessly to not even be able to
bring food home to their families, and worst off- more cases of death and
suicides. As defined by dictionary.com, a sweatshop is “a shop employing
workers at low wages, for long hours, and under poor conditions.” Clearly,
there is not much that is positive about sweatshops. These horrible
institutions somehow continue to exist, and it is scary because giant
corporations like Nike and Apple are only increasing their profit margins, but
despite this these poor workers continue to earn little to nothing under awful
conditions.
` To put it into perspective of how
much these companies are making and how little the workers are making at the
same time, I want to share a fact that I read from an article back when I took
an economics course that was about sweatshops. The shop of the National
Football League, where most football fans buy their equipment, charges very
expensive prices for their apparel because it is considered authentic gear. This
authentic gear is manufactured in sweatshops, mostly in Asia and Africa, by
young children working twelve hours a day. The NFL shop is selling Nike's
licensed team jackets for $139.99 each, which is equivalent to two months’ pay
for a Nike sweatshop worker located in Cambodia.[i] These
big name companies choose to employ laborers in countries like China, Cambodia,
Indonesia, and many African countries because it is significantly cheaper to
have them work for the company rather than having American employees. Where
race comes into play is when you look at where a majority of these sweatshops
are located- many are countries in Asia, Africa, and South America. Not
coincidentally, these are countries that are stricken with poverty, so it makes
sense economically for companies to employ workers from these poor nations,
since a really bad job is better than no job at all and starving.
Sweatshops and the people running them are truly
disgusting and it is shocking that they are still a huge part of society. If I
had to compare them to something we have discussed in class, I would say it is
an extremely severe form of institutional discrimination. We defined
institutional discrimination as the denial of rights or opportunities that
result from the normal operations of society. These people are not only being
denied the normal rights and operations of society, but they are being degraded
to working ridiculously long in factories with unsafe conditions and terrible
bosses who are relentless towards the workers and have absolutely no care for
their personal well-being. It is also an example of stratification because it
is a part of structured social inequality- and the bizarre part of it all is
that it is being structured by huge corporations that are already making huge profits
and could clearly afford to pay these workers more.
In developing countries, an estimated 250 million
children in between the ages of 5-14 are sweatshop laborers. Furthermore, a
study showed that doubling the salary of sweatshop workers would only increase
the consumer cost of an item by 1.8%, while consumers would be willing to pay
15% more to know a product did not come from a sweatshop.[ii]
For more shocking
statistics on sweatshops, please visit https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-sweatshops.
Baffling to see how such large successful corporations, that dominate the public sector, such as Nike, can practice such immoral tactics. To see the difference between what it costs to make their products, and then how they sell them for the price of luxury goods is somewhat sickening.
ReplyDeleteReally interesting read.I really liked the way you covered sweatshops from the different regions in the world. I wonder what role globalization plays in the many themes you covered in your blog
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