Sweatshop Globalzation
...ercial front. In essence, all sweatshops, by definition, exist in a cover world, one that they are run in the shadows of society. Sweatshops are clandestine operations. They are operations in which people, making little or no money, word hard hour-after-hour, day-after-day. People who work in sweatshops should not be compared, in any way, with traditional workers, who are paid a pre-determined amount of money for the work which they do. In our society, as well as most in industrialized nations, people earn a fair wage (depending on the country) for work which they perform. They are projected by government and industry rules, and are sometimes represented by unions, which look out for their well-being. These workers, though many are overworked and not adequately compensated, are protected. Their welfare is looked after by regulating agencies and organizations. In essence, these people (those in traditional employment) are well looked-after. Those people who work in sweatshops, on the contrary, have none of the aforementioned protections. There is no agency or regulation which is there to look after them. They have no rights, no privileges. By definition, those people who are forced to work in sweatshops have no rights whatsoever. They are subject to the whims to their employers, who are running illegal operations. But the fact that these sweatshops exist is well enough known. What’s important to speak about is something else altogether. We need to see what these sweatshops represent, why they exist, and the roles that they play in the worldwide economy. Whether you buy products made from sweatshop environments or not, sweatshops have a definite impact in seemingly every aspect of our economy, as well as our society. When it comes to commerce, sweatshops have an effect on any economy, even a major one in our own. Yes, as strange as it may appear, sweatshops have even, and probably still do, exist in the Untied States. A good example of this troubling phenomenon was uncovered in 1995. “On August 2, 1995, police raided a fenced compound of apartments in El Monte, California. They arrested eight operators, and freed 73 illegal Thai immigrants, who had been forced to sew in captivity.” (www.americanhistory.si.edu). In this instance, the authorities had, after much investigation, uncovered this sweatshop, which had virtually imprisoned workers, effectively making them slaves. The shop had been in business for quite some time, and it produced millions of dollars of merchandise, using slave labor. As the story was uncovered, it was revealed that these slave workers, all from Thailand, were brought to this country under the guise of immigrating to this country, and reaping the economic and social benefits of this land. Evidently, the sweatshop operators had promised these people immigration into the U.S., something which is very hard to achieve for most people from Thailand (and many other third-world nations), in exch...