Sweatshops main goal is to make more money than they are willing to spend on their workers and their factories. As I’ve continued my research of sweatshops it was made clear to me that sweatshops share similar features which are horrible working conditions, low pay, and abuse their workers. They force them to work long hours for very little money, yet these big companies make millions a year. Annabelle Wong stated in her article, “From a business perspective, sweatshops are overwhelmingly lucrative since they capitalize on low-wage labor in developing countries and significantly reduce production costs.” In other words big companies see sweatshops as a way for them to gain even more money. They take advantage of those innocent people working in the sweatshops for their own benefit. Sweatshops were started by people who thought the same as these businessmen and company owners. Referencing back to my historical context the first sweatshops were created to put “inferior” people to work. But why did they want them to work? Because their work benefited them, and did nothing for the workers. For example Bruce Rockowitz a business executive who is head of Li & Fung Limited, a supplier to Macy’s and Kohl’s that is based in low wage countries like Bangladesh, believed that safer working conditions would mean higher prices. However David L. Wilson said, “...where changing fashions and brand name prestige have a disproportionate effect on pricing; the difference between a $120 pair of Nike sneakers and the $30 shoes at a discount store doesn't come from high wages for workers at Nike’s Indonesian suppliers.” Wilson also adds on, “But the sweatshop system isn't about what consumers want, and it's certainly not about what the workers want; the goal is to increase profits for manufacturers and retailers, to make the super rich even richer.” So changing the quality of their working environment won’t actually affect the cost of the product, it has to do more with the brand. Also, the higher the price does not guarantee that the workers are being paid high wages. Wilson also meant that sweatshops are not made to help the workers, they are meant to keep those in power, with power and even more money. Both of these quotes are important because they show how economic growth have caused people to keep sweatshops going. Without people wanting to gain all this economic growth and money there would never have began exploiting people, which would have prevented sweatshops.
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Since economics drives sweatshops a marxist criticism, which according to a definition from the the dictionary, “ ...especially the doctrine that the state throughout history has been a device for the exploitation of the masses by a dominant class, that class struggle has been the main agency of historical change, and that the capitalist system, containing from the first the seeds of its own decay…” Clearly sweatshops have been the device for exploitation, the workers living in poverty would be the masses, and the dominant class would be the company owners. This proves that sweatshops are somewhat ran in different levels. In order to keep everything running efficiently and without changing anything that they are already doing. Not only do sweatshops fall into these different social classes, they also have exploitation of the workers. Since they see the workers as lower class than them, the people with higher class don’t mind not paying them. According to Gary Lapon, “ Marx argued that the ultimate source of profit, the driving force behind capitalist production, is the unpaid labor of workers. So for Marx, exploitation forms the foundation of the capitalist system.” In other words, if companies want to keep that high status they have and make the huge amounts of money they are use too, they have to pay their workers very low wages. This is important because it shows how exploitation has kept the Marxist ideas in sweatshops. Sweatshops have allowed to keep exploiting the lower class people, keeping them in poverty and with little to no ways out.
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