The Hidden Truth
In modern society, we are constantly bombarded with decisions of what retailer or brand to buy supplies from. We no longer have just a supermarket; we have a wide variety of merchandise retailers to choose from. Debating where to go depending on the price of products, or perhaps the quality, is a decision we battle with constantly. Yet, without thinking twice about where the product came from, or its environmental impact, many of us go right ahead pick up the item, toss it in the trolley and rush to pay for because we don’t have time to care about stuff like this. There are other important things, like when to get the car oil changed, right?
Multinational corporations (MNC) such as Mattel, Google, Microsoft, and eBay to
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Even though words cannot do justice in emphasising the massive effect Multinational corporations such as this one have globally, their injurious actions are affecting the environment from all directions as well as aspects of our day-to-day life, something as simple as breathing clean air. Diminishing the finite sources available in a certain areas, they are able to pack their bags and move to another place, leaving many of its workers jobless. Subsequently, employability established by new markets opening up provides opportunities to people to earn money in order to support themselves and their families. However, the jobs multinational corporations have provided require little to no expertise and are deskilled , which most commonly is referred to as a “job worse than McDonalds”. In addition to this, workers receive a pay less than minimum wage for extensive manual labour, barely enough for one meal a day. Sweatshops are a prime example of cheap labour of eight hours a day; the Reference for Business Encyclopedia claims that “one of the earliest examples of a sweatshop was in the crude textile mills of Ecuador” where the Spanish conquerors enslaved the natives for the manufacture of clothes and textiles. In more recent years, the majority of sweatshops have been successfully transformed into businesses with more reasonable working conditions, but nonetheless sweatshops do continue to exist in places where
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
Cambridge dictionary defines sweatshop as a small factory where workers are paid very little and work many hours under bad conditions. People working there are deprived of any kind of worker’s benefit. Child labor is very common in sweatshops. Workers in sweatshops are often missing key pieces of safety equipment such as face masks to ensure safe breathing or work in environments with insufficient means of emergency exit since employers may lock the doors and windows to prevent theft during working hours (Hartman ). The workers are abused, beaten, kicked, and shoved, even if they are sick or pregnant. Sweatshop is nothing but a modern form of slavery, because the workers are forced to work in harsh condition for a little wage, and they are denied any fundamental human rights .
This shows that although the Maquiladora industries are able to provide employment to those in poverty, the end result does not help these men and women prepare for a future outside of their alienated tasks at these factories and they are also subject to unethical practices, making it clear the poverty affects the work of Hondurans. Another academic source The Economist published an article in 1997 which was during the uproar of the clothing manufacturing industries and had this to say about what they found out on the Maquiladora industries: “In the worst sweatshops, women work 16-hour days with a single half-hour break. Some work 80 hours a week without overtime pay or take
First, sweatshops have poor working conditions. Examples of poor working conditions are factories are not ventilated; no toilets, have to work for longer hours, there is no emergency exists and minimum wages are given. There are some owners of sweatshops who forced their employees to work for longer hours but pay a minimum wage. This is proved in a case called Two Cheers for Sweatshops, Mongkol’s daughter had to work for nine hours straight but she is only paid $2 a day. She also works six days in a week. The poor working conditions actually can affect a person mental and physical
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.
Unlike slavery which had existed for thousands years, sweatshops was created about two hundred years ago. In general, sweatshop
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,
In addition, Immigration is a huge issue today. Many Americans think that immigrants are the reason behind there not being many jobs in the U.S. Also, the reason why the unemployment rate is high in America. Lots of Americans agree on the issue that immigrants that come here turn out to be criminals and causing a lot of trouble in America.
As horrifying as it is to think about, comparisons can be made between the situations of current workers in third-world countries and the plight of the African slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In many of the current poverty-stricken places seen around the globe, sweatshops are developed in order to employ laborers. Sweatshops are described as places of abysmal working conditions with low pay and tedious hours. In the article, "Black People in a White People's Country," Gary Nash notes that the African slave trade was originally developed to "fill labor shortages in the economies of its European initiators and their commercial partners." This description is similar to the motive behind the employment of third-world sweatshop workers. Both systems, ancient and modern, include the need for more laborers and disregard the vital needs of their employees/slaves as long as the work is getting done. Workers are harmfully exploited in both
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
Most of the clothes that people wear every day in America were more likely made in sweatshops. Sweatshops are factories, and they exist in most countries, especially in third world countries. Sweatshops are usually crowded with many workers into small tenement rooms, poorly ventilated, and prone to fires and rat infestation. Products that commonly come from sweatshops are carpets, cotton, garments, cocoa, coffee, toys, and furniture. The danger of sweatshops are affecting many people around the world including men, women and young children. Sweatshops violates more than two of the labor laws, and they exploit many workers by offering them very low wages that could barely pay for food to survive, and they make
Characteristically speaking the speech in only 15 lines embodies Lady Macbeth’s intentions, thoughts, personality and power. By showing her change from a woman and wife to her genderless idea of power; the transformation gives her most inner thoughts a way into the world. It is unsurprising for this to come from her, as it is at the very beginning of her appearance within the play. The speech stands as a foundation to her character. Any idea of who she is can be made from these lines and her future acts are foreshadowed to. Her spell of sorts is not only one that she hopes will help her husband and make the prophecy come true but also a speech to herself. The words she speaks are meant for her own ears. She must persuade herself she is
Contrastively, globalization itself has great damage to the environment. Due to developed countries going into developing countries to exploit their resources, the natural resources is depleting at a rapid speed, yet we are still not doing enough to stop it. As there are strict laws regarding the environment in developed countries, these companies turn their eyes onto developing countries whose environmental laws are more relaxed in comparison. As these developing countries also want to earn revenue and income that these companies bring, they open the door to them, but destroying Mother Earth at the same time.
The First World War left massive destructions in the world since many people lost their lives and even property. These massive destructions were as partly as a result of the introduction of new war weapons, for example, machine guns and gas warfare. This war was majorly between Germany and the Allied power but Germany was blamed for the destructions that came about because they are said to have initiated the war (Kissinger, 2014). These destructions made people have a lot of fear towards any kind of war and nobody wished for any war to start again because people feared losing lives and property once again. It is said that hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the Western Front particularly lost their lives in this war.
Globalization have some positive impacts on the environment to some extent but there are still some crucial negative impacts of globalization in play. The negative impacts are mainly export-orientated* destruction on the environment whilst the positive impacts are increase awareness and multinational corporations’ research into eco-friendly technology.