Knowra Sweatshop Sweatshop A workplace where employees labor for low pay under poor, unsafe, or exploitative conditions. Sweatshops are associated with weak worker protections and intense pressure to produce goods cheaply.
Global value chain : The full network of activities and firms involved in designing, producing, distributing, and selling a product. Brands can rely on distant suppliers, making responsibility for factory conditions harder to trace.
Industrial Revolution : The transformation from agrarian economies to mechanized industry that began in Britain in the eighteenth century. Factory growth created new workplaces where long hours and dangerous conditions became widespread.
Occupational safety and health : The field concerned with preventing work-related injuries, illnesses, and deaths. Unsafe equipment, overcrowding, and fire hazards turn poor conditions into immediate physical risks.
Fair trade : A trading approach that seeks better terms and standards for producers and workers. Fair-trade standards offer a market-based response to exploitative production, though they do not cover every factory.
Garment industry : The industry that designs, manufactures, and sells clothing and related textiles. Its low-cost, time-sensitive production has made it a prominent setting for sweatshop labor.
Tenement manufacturing : Small-scale production carried out in crowded residential buildings, often by low-paid workers. In nineteenth-century cities, garment work in tenements became closely associated with sweatshop conditions.
Child labor : Work that deprives children of their childhood or harms their development, education, or health. Some sweatshops employ children, exposing them to dangerous work and lost schooling.
Living wage : A wage sufficient to meet basic needs in a particular place and time. It sets a benchmark beyond the low wages commonly associated with sweatshop labor.
Subcontracting : The practice of hiring an outside firm to perform work or supply services. Factories may pass orders to smaller workshops where oversight and labor protections are weaker.
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire : A 1911 New York City factory fire that killed 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women. The disaster exposed locked exits and unsafe conditions in a notorious garment workplace.
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