Black People In A White People's Country Summary

Sweatshops have been around for centuries, beginning around the late 1880’s. Sweatshops are classified by three main components, long work hours, very low pay and unsafe and unhealthy working environments. Sweatshops are usually found in manufacturing industries and the most highlighted production is clothing corporations, who take full advantage of the low production costs of their products. Many may think sweatshops are a thing of the past but they are still affecting many lives across the nations. There are many ways sweatshops affect lives, but a recent article titled “New study finds ‘more sweatshops than Starbucks’ in Chicago” explains that there are many low wage industry jobs that are violating labor laws in the United States alone. The article also reports how employees who are working in such conditions won’t speak up in fear of the retaliation employers will implement. Analyzing Sweatshops through the lens of the Sociological perspectives will help us better understand the illegal conditions of workplaces that still exist today.

The earliest use of sweatshops labor can be traced back to the time of Spanish conquistadors and the colonization of South America. In Ecuador, the native people were forced to work under terrible conditions in mills that produced garments, cloth, and various other textile goods. Moving forward on the historical timeline to Europe’s Industrial Revolution, sweatshops became increasingly more common. In 1889 the British government launched the first investigation into the terrible conditions under which sweatshop workers, namely women and children,

Time and time again, there have been opposing views on just about every single possible topic one could fathom. From the most politically controversial topics of gun control and stem cell research to the more mundane transparent ones of brown or white rice and hat or no hat—it continues. Sweatshops and the controversy surrounding them is one that is unable to be put into simplistic terms, for sweatshops themselves are complex. The grand debate of opposing views in regards to sweatshops continues between two writers who both make convincing arguments as to why and how sweatshops should or should not be dealt with. In Sweat, Fire and Ethics, by Bob Jeffcott, he argues that more people ought to worry less about the outer layers of sweatshops and delve deeper into the real reason they exist and the unnecessariness of them. In contrast, Jeffrey D. Sachs writes of the urgent requirement of sweatshops needed during the industrialization time in a developing country, in his article of Bangladesh: On the Ladder of Development. The question is then asked: How do sweatshops positively and negatively affect people here in the United States of America and in other countries around the world?

The slave trade in the North American colonies began to grow in the 1600s. The African slave trade sourced their slaves from many different West African villages and countries. The business of slavery was a growing and profitable field, not only for the slavers, but also for the slaveholders. With the decrease of indentured servants, settlers in the English colonies looked for a new source of labor to satisfy their growing labor demands. The next source was Africa. “By the 1690s slaves outnumbered indentured servants four to one” (45). Europeans largely disregarded the ethical dilemma posed by slavery due to the European view of Africans and their culture as uncivilized, foreign, and heathen (44). The largest forced migration in history (44)

What if you were captured as a slave how would you feel? Do you think you could survive? In the 1700’s life was very different than it is now. Back then if you were a Negro you would have to be extra careful or you could be sold as a slave. But imagine being sold after witnessing the death of your parents and being a child you would be traumatized. Now we do not have those kinds of worries; life was very different then than it is now. As a child, Aminata was taken away and captured as a slave, faced public humiliation, and lost her family, but in the end she overcame it all.

It is impossible for anyone to survive a horrible event in their life without a relationship to have to keep them alive. The connection and emotional bond between the person suffering and the other is sometimes all they need to survive. On the other hand, not having anyone to believe in can make death appear easier than life allowing the person to give up instead of fighting for survival. In The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, Aminata Diallo survives her course through slavery by remembering her family and the friends that she makes. Aminata is taught by her mother, Sira to deliver babies in the villages of her homeland. This skill proves to be very valuable to Aminata as it helps her deliver her friends babies and create a source of

“The Book of Negroes is a master piece, daring and impressive in its geographic, historical and human reach, convincing in its narrative art and detail, necessary for imagining the real beyond the traces left by history.” I completely agree with The Globe and Mail’s interpretation of this story. One could almost see the desolate conditions of the slave boats and feel the pain of every person brought into slavery. Lawrence Hill created a compelling story that depicts the hard ships, emotional turmoil and bravery when he wrote The Book of Negroes.

Some insist on the slavery based on the fact of “importation”. A scholar Tillinghast-Phillip interpreted that West African culture helps Negros survive from the exploitation and domestication because a discovery in West Africa of domestication had been adopted on their own population before. Those inhabited cities before leaving for America mostly are under Moslem influence developed with partly civilization, techniques and mature agriculture system—Dahomey, Ashanti, Yoruba, which overweighs Indians for the labor sector. Negros were implied hard working by the proverbs, aphorisms, and customs of the West African. The slaves were quick to take advantage and to work because of planters despaired of making diversification pay. They attribute the acre of

Sweatshops date back to as far as the 16th century, but were first exposed in Britain in 1889. Around the 1830s-1840s, immigrants started coming to the United States and organized sweatshops in tenement buildings. Despite poor health problems and disease from the harsh conditions, immigrants needed the work and were appreciative. Today sweatshops are often found in slow, developing countries, but many are found around the world. Majority of the workers are commonly women and children, who are usually uneducated. By classifying what a sweatshop is, it is a workplace that violates more than one federal and state labor law and their employees work for long

Sweatshops are a workplace where workers are subject to extreme exploitation, including the absence of a living wage, poor benefits, health and safety hazards, and random discipline (AMM 245, Kim). According to the department of labor, a sweatshop is a factory that violates two or more labor laws (http://www.dol.gov/). There is much controversy over the definition but sweatshops are manufacturers that don’t pay living wages, have low safety standards, don’t pay overtime, make employees work an abnormal amount of hours, have physical and mental abuse, among other issues. Sweatshops started in America during the industrialization period of the nineteenth period. People from Europe came to the United States in the attempt to create a better life for themselves and when they arrived most of them

From the minute Chinese citizens began to work for outside companies, they were exploited and taken advantage of. (Miller 2013) Once sweatshops were outlawed in North America and Europe in the mid 1900s due to their inhumane practices, foreigners were quick to flock to developing countries that did not have the same laws in place. Firms sought out manufacturers in poorer nations that could provide the highest quality product at the cheapest cost and Chinese migrants were easy prey for manufacturers who paid small wages and offered poor working conditions. Meagre social and economic conditions in developing China resulted in a great amount of people willing to accept any wage and management systems that neglected the workers. Multinational textile firms soon grew to rely on foreign subcontractors for their production needs. (Pugatch 1998) The system estranged corporations from the production process, and in turn resulted in the estrangement of the consumers from the production process, which encouraged and continues to encourage the ignorance that fuels the sweatshop system. The relationship between corporation and producer was only further separated as agents arranged subcontracting for companies, allowing these companies to have the goods they were selling produced in factories they had never seen. The subcontractors were met with severe corporate deadlines and targets in order to stay in business, leaving workers as the sacrificial

Sweatshops have always been a problem in the Unites States, especially during the past century. Unfair working conditions and pay prompted the formation of the Garment Worker

In the beginning Locke tells us about “the tide of Negro migration”. During this time in a movement known as the Great Migration, thousand of African Americans also known as Negros left their homes in the South and moved North toward the beach line of big cities in search of employment and a new beginning. They left the South because of racial violence such as the Ku Klux Klan and economic discrimination not able to obtain work. Their migration was an expression of their changing attitudes toward themselves as Locke said best From The New Negro, and has been described as "something like a spiritual emancipation." Many African Americans moved to Harlem, a neighborhood located in

By definition a sweatshop is a “negatively connoted term for any working environment considered to be unacceptably difficult or dangerous. Sweatshop workers often work long hours for very low pay in horrible conditions, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay and or minimum wage”. Many corporations in the United States use sweatshop labor in countries over seas such as China to produce their products at a lower cost. As entailed in the letter from a man born in China, many citizens on these countries resort to factory labor to support themselves to escape other sources on income such as prostitution. Without these corporations usage of oversea sweatshops these employees would be forced to return to self-demeaning jobs such as these.

Abstract: Many countries, industries and people are becoming more affected by sweatshops in different ways because of they’re continuous increase in growth. Sweatshops benefit many developing countries as they provide opportunities of employment to the people living in poverty and benefit the community at large by creating an economic infrastructure that utilizes the country’s resources and increases their tax base. These institutions first came into existence in the early 1800’s and were referred to as dwelling houses, which were local factories that generally had the same idea of the sweatshop that we have in today’s society. There