User:Ivy Mon/Sweatshop

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A sweatshop or sweat factory is a crowded workplace with very poor, socially unacceptable or illegal working conditions. Some illegal working conditions include poor ventilation, little to no breaks, inadequate work space, insufficient lighting, or uncomfortably high temperatures. The work may be difficult, tiresome, dangerous, climatically challenging or underpaid. Workers in sweatshops may work long hours with unfair wages, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage; child labor laws may also be violated. Women make up 85 to 90% of sweatshop workers and would be forced by employers to take birth control and routine pregnancy tests to avoid supporting maternity leave or providing health benefits.

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Sweatshops are also sometimes implicated in human trafficking when workers have been tricked into starting work without informed consent, or when workers are kept at work through debt bondage or mental duress, all of which are more likely if the workforce is drawn from children or the uneducated rural poor.[citation needed] Because they often exist in places without effective workplace safety or environmental laws, sweatshops sometimes injure their workers or the environment at greater rates than would be acceptable in developed countries.[citation needed] Penal labor facilities (employing prisoners) may be grouped under the sweatshop label due to underpaid work conditions.

Workers then go into a state of forced labor, and if even one day of work is not accounted for could get immediately fired. These working conditions have been the source of suicidal unrest within factories in the past. Chinese sweatshops known to have increased numbers of suicidal employees have suicide nets covering the whole site, in place to stop over-worked and stressed employees leaping to their deaths, such as in the case of the Foxconn suicides.

Recently, Boohoo came under light since auditors uncovered large chain of factories in Leicester producing clothes for Boohoo were only paying their workers between £3-4. The conditions of the factories were described as terrible and workers received 'illegally low pay'.

World-famous fashion brands such as H&M, Nike, Adidas and Uniqlo have all been criticized for their use of sweatshops. In 2015, anti-sweatshops protesters marched against the Japanese fast-fashion brand Uniqlo in Hong Kong. Along with the Japanese anti-sweatshops organisation Human Rights Now!, the Hong Kong labour organisation SACOM (Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour) protested the "harsh and dangerous" working conditions in Uniqlo's value-added factories in China.