When you hear the word Sweatshop you begin to see pictures of small, dangerous, and dirty factories in the lower eastside of New York. In there you would find immigrant woman and children working extremely long hours without benefits and with little pay (Szumanski). Sweatshops in the garment industry are growing and changes need to be made to make the working conditions safer. .
One of the largest industries in the United States, the garment industry is dominated by less than one thousand manufacturers who parcel out production to about twenty thousand contractors and subcontractors, all of whom enter and exit the industry easily. The United States Garment industry has long been seen as an industry with extreme price competition, low wages, an immigrant workforce, and a vulnerability to sweatshop working conditions (Morra). The conditions in these Sweatshops are terrible and they gotten worse of late. The General Accounting office went on raids of garment sweatshops with the federal and state labor law investigators in New York City and Los Angeles. There they found bad working conditions. "Some of the citations for violations that federal or state officials issued included exposed electrical wiring, blocked aisles, unguarded machinery, and unsanitary bathrooms. Some experts also described the working conditions in a typical garment shop as including poor lighting, temperature control, and ventilation as well as blocked aisles" (Morra). In an article by Julie Chaos in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution it tells a story about a seventeen year-old girl named Zhao Fangta, who works in a sweatshop in China. It says that he lives in a dorm room shared by ten to fifteen other workers although some rooms sleep as many as twenty-four (Chao). One of Zhao" co-workers complained about the conditions. "It's so hot, but he never turns on the air conditioning. Its really miserable inside" (Chao).