#1 Introduction

The term "sweatshop" first appeared in the United States in 1867. It originally referred to the system of
"feeding and harvesting at home" implemented by American garment manufacturers, and later referred
to the contractor system by the contractor to find someone to work on his own. In both cases, the daily
wages received by workers are not the least. However, because it avoids the collective game behavior
that collective workers may have in a formal factory, its unit product wages (piece-rate wages) can be
suppressed to a minimum, and thus it is called a “sweating system”. Later, the concept was extended to
arrangements such as high-performing piece-rate wages and high-speed assembly lines, but it was also
conditioned to avoid collective bargaining.

At the beginning of the reform and opening up until 2000, China's factories can be said to be a rare worker.
The Pearl River Delta factory can fill the factory gates as long as it recruits workers. Going grey channels
requires acquaintances or spending money to get into the factory. This has been around for the first few
years of this century. China was very poor at first, and the people were willing to make hard-earned money.
For example, in the factory of Hong Kong capitalists, the first two and sixteenth of each month need to
sacrifice the gods. Those who worship the gods, chickens and fish, will go back to the workers' canteen to
become the workers' food. This is a very good welfare for workers who have come over in the age of lack
of supplies. In that era, workers will often talk about it. However, the past standard is no longer fit today’s
standard, as the growth and development of economy, many factories in China and other relative poor
places or those places that have cheap labor still use the old houses which is unsafe and can easily put
those workers in a dangerous place. Also the transparency of the apparent industry is pretty low, those
injured workers won’t even get their compensation. Due to these kinds of problem, these kind of factories
are called sweatshops which need to be solved, and due to the range of sweatshop, it has become a global
issue.

Why is this issue important to me?

The majority (85%-90%) of the labor hired in the sweatshop are women, in this situation, some of the
employers of the factories will ask them to take birth control and schedule their pregnancy tests to
avoid the employees to leave because of pregnancy. People always think sweatshop is the factories that
like a concentration camp and they always think always think the number of sweatshop must be pretty
small. However, actually US department of labor defined those factories that violates 2+ labor laws as
sweatshop, which is really common among thousands of factories in the world, so it is really a common
question, maybe one of your relatives is working in a sweatshop now. And sweatshops exist because
they are the product of reducing the cost of the final product in the manufacture process, entrepreneurs
think a lower price will make more consumers happy but actually research had shown that we want to
double the saltires of workers, the consumer cost of an item would only increase by 1.8%, and we only
need to pay 15% more to make sure that the products we buy do not come from a sweatshop. Also, lots
of sweatshop involved in the problem of using child laborers, since the younger generations are the
hope for the future, we need to make sure that they are receiving education for their future , the
country’s future GDP and absolutely this will affect you in future, and in the region of Asia, Pacific and
Sub-Saharan Africa, up to 20% children are in child labor.

E Journal Entry #2
One incentive I found in my global issue-sweatshop is that when the government discover those
sweatshops in their jurisdiction, they may punish them by giving them infringement ticket according to
the law in order to warn them not to do that again. Also, to set up a target for other factories to refute.
However, if they always do this kind of punishment to the sweatshop factories to prevent them from
abuse the human rights of workers in their factory, it will become a bad incentive. A bad incentive hardly
works for those sweatshop factories because the punishment of disobeying one or two law provisions will
not bring them a huge amount of punishment penalty will not fluctuate the other factory or even the
fined factories itself because, in that low-cost manufacturing condition, the profit of these factories is far
higher than the fine. Moreover, not every time this factory will be punished, so to a large extent they
won’t care about the government’s stipulation.

This kind of incentives do relate to the lack of “long-run consideration” of the government officials. In the
case I mentioned in the last paragraph, this government only think about the idea of better late than never,
they do not consider will the way of punishment really works for that kind of company, or if the system of
“find and punish” really work. If the government really want to completely eradicate sweatshop one and
for all, they may need to set up a more strict, close monitoring agencies monitor these factories for
violations of the law and impose harsher penalties, such as revoking their business licenses or restricting
future loans to factory managers.

I action I found that had been made or we can call it set up is that some of the designers that work in the
fashion industry or some job in fashion related industries had set up an NGO called “who made your
clothes” in order to let more people know and boycott the existence of sweatshops. They also made
lectures around the EU countries to let more people join them to fight with the brands that is not
transparent enough to the public or been verified existing the phenomena of squeezing the workers’ wage
or working condition in of fashion industry, I think their general direction is right, but although they have
a lot of people supporting them, they still need the government to legislate the new policy to push the
society forward. So, I think they still need to strengthen the relation and corporation with the government.
Also, to let the consumers stand on the opposite of the current status and propose to pay about 15% more
money in order to eliminate those sweatshops.

E Journal Entry #3
In sweatshop cases, if the factories choose to gain more profit by squeezing those workers in their
sweatshop, they may gain more money since the cost of each clothes become smaller and thus the
revenue of the factories will become relative bigger. However, if they choose to set their factories’
image as a sweatshop, which may bring them a lot of bad effect like the NGOs may held protest rallies
around the factory. Also, the government will also put a stress on the factories because the officials do
not want to lose approval rate because they did not effectively solve this problem. Their reputation will
become negative too. For those principled brands, they will never sign contrast with them for the
purpose of get again from troubles.

One of the hidden costs of sweatshop is obvious that the law enforcement agencies will put fine on
them if they were found to be sweatshops and this is one of the easiest hidden cost to be find. Also,
since the factories will sweatshop their workers for more money, they may also reduce the budget on
the building fee of the factories, so the workers may not have a secure working place, which can easily
cause safety accidents to happen. If incidents appears, they may be ordered by the court to make huge
compensation to the victims' families.