The article The Triangle Legacy: 90 Years After Fire, Sweatshops Persist highlights the history of sweatshops in America and the continuing problems our society faces when garment manufacturers attempt to cut costs. What is a sweatshop? The word "sweatshop" originated in the 19th century to describe a contracting system in which the middlemen earned profits between the amount they received for a contract and the amount they paid to the workers. The marginal cost was said to be "sweated" from the workers because they received minimal wages for excessive hours worked under unsanitary conditions. (http://www.southendpress.org/books/SweatshopExcerpt.shtml) A "sweatshop" is a workplace that exploits its workers and includes lack of living wages or benefits, poor working conditions, and unnecessary disciplinary actions. In recent years the government defines a sweatshop as "an employer that violates more than one federal or state labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers" compensation, or industry registration laws."(http://americanhistory.si.edu/sweatshops/index.htm).
Sweatshops have probably been around ever since man began working for man. The initial recognition of worker mistreatment was not sparked by a real event but by a work of fiction. In 1907, a California socialist by the name of Upton Sinclair published a book called The Jungle. This novel detailed the atrocities an immigrant family faced working in a Chicago meatpacking plant. Immigrants were suffering from long hours, low pay, child labor and horrific work conditions, this book made society realize the eminent problem sweatshops evoked upon humanity. (http://www.online-literature.com/upton_sinclair/) This work of fiction would soon be followed by true-life tragedy that would introduce the problem of sweatshops to the world. March 25, 1911 was a turning point in the apparel business as well as the American public.