Content area
Full Text
The 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 people, reignited worldwide calls for new labor laws and increased government regulation in poorer countries that produce garments in so-called sweatshops. However, these calls for laws and regulation fail to view sweatshops in the proper historical perspective.
Sweatshop is a common term used to refer to factories that typically produce apparel; that have very low wages by modern U.S. standards, long working hours, and unsafe or unhealthy working conditions; that often don't obey labor laws; and that would generally be considered unpleasant places to work by most citizens in wealthy countries.
Sweatshops first appeared in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century and persisted there until the early twentieth century. In the United States, the first textile sweatshops appeared in the early nineteenth century in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Virtually every wealthy country in the world had sweatshops at one point in their past. Sweatshops are an important stage in the process of economic development. As Jeffery Sachs puts it, "[SJweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty" (2005, 11).
This article traces the role sweatshops played in the process of economic development in wealthy countries today. It also examines the role that labor laws played in the eventual improvement of working conditions. The conclusion contains historical lessons for countries where sweatshops are located today.
Sweatshops in Nineteenth-Century Great Britain and the United States
"Whenever I raise the point that it is immoral to shut us up in a close [sic] room twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious of employment, I am told that we have come to the mills voluntarily and we can leave when we will. Voluntarily! . . . The whip which brings us to Lowell is necessity. We must have money; a father's debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be supported, a brother's ambition to be aided and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery."1
These were the words, in 1845, of Sarah Bagley, who worked in Lowell, Massachusetts, and became the vice president of the Lowell Union of Associationists,...