In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company building went up in flames, and one hundred and forty six young female workers" lives came to an end. The New York legislature was forced to pass laws regulating the work hours and conditions, marking one of the first steps to decrease sweatshop labor. In the past decade, several associations all around the world have successfully aided the fight to reduce corporations" use of sweatshops. Competition causes big businesses to strive for the best profit, and the labor source rarely impedes upon their financial system, because sweatshop labor is cheap labor. With the help of committees like USAS, NLC, and SCALE, people are becoming informed of the horrible sweatshop conditions, and they are organizing coalitions to end the worker misuse and abuse.
What exactly makes a factory qualify as a sweatshop? By direct quote of an encyclopedia, a sweatshop is a "workplace where conditions are oppressive and unhealthy and where there is unchecked exploitation of workers" (Sweatshops 435). Sweatshop labor includes many unjust practices, with a mass of unskilled and unorganized laborers, as well as ignorance of poor working conditions. The imperfect systems of management tend to neglect the workers as humans, with contracts that carve out excessive exploitation and produce unpredictable employment (Sweatshops 435). The use of this unjust labor system has presented a problem for a long time.
Sweatshops have existed for over one hundred years. Complaints of sweatshop labor began in the 1860s, when the wives of civil war soldiers were employed to make uniforms. During the 1880s, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe provided an immense amount of cheap labor. The problems of low wages and harmful conditions greatly increased during the twentieth century industrialization period, and the amount of sweatshops exploded in Latin America and Asia.