Ninety per cent of the factory jobs go to women and the majority of women hired are between the ages of fourteen and thirty. The reason for this is that in the free trade zones there is immense sexism and the young women they hire are at their physical prime meaning that they can endure the hard tasks set for them the six or seven days a week in which they work.
Women also get fired just for being pregnant. Some companies have been investigated for forcing their female workers to take birth control as well as making them have abortions. All companies claim to offer maternity leave as well as other benefits such as union membership but it is very rare that any of this ever takes place.
A method of keeping their employees which has so far proved effective is surrounding sweatshops by high fences with barbed wire which are patrolled by hired guards with shot guns. It has also been helpful when trying to keep the public eye out. No one can question what goes on inside these factories as the sweatshop owners let no one inspect or investigate their factories. The big brands that hire them have more power than the average man but they chose to do nothing. They say that they are not responsible for how the factories treat their workers as they do not own or control them.
In China's main garment district, Wuhan was exposed one summer when a seventeen year old girl died from heat and exhaustion. Before Liu Li died, her temperature was forty-two degrees Celsius. The temperature outside was only a scorching thirty-six degrees Celsius. The room in which she worked was being further warmed by an old electric fan. Her mother refuses to blame the factory for her death. All she will say is that her child was not blessed with good fortune.
For this hard labour workers get paid about one pence of every two ponds you spend. Factories claim that this amount of money is very decent for these countries as it is minimum wage but the reality is that parents can not afford to feed themselves, let alone their children on so little a month.
So a sweatshop has been found to be factories where workers are subject to extreme exploitation, including super-low wages, no benefits, filthy or dangerous working conditions, denial of their worker and human rights.
So is there a solution? Sweatshops could be permanently closed and factories which follow human rights laws be set up in places such as Britain and the United States providing jobs for first world workers. However, this would be costly and it may be far better if the factories stayed in the countries they are presently in but started treating workers more fairly by paying larger wages and offering things such as maternity leave which people in this country take for granted. The majority of people who work in free trade zones are farmers who can not all live off the little money they make. People work at sweatshops just so that they can support their families. Not because it is their dream job or because they believe that it will make them a lot of money. By closing down sweatshops we may eliminate one problem but there is the possibility that a much greater one would replace it due to the lack of opportunities to work provided by the free trade zones.
