WHAT ARE SOME PROBLEMS WITH SWEATSHOPS?
Well-known companies like Walt Disney, The Gap, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Levis have purchased from or manufactured products in sweatshops. Like all businesses, sweatshops like to keep their costs low. However, they fail to comply with minimum wage laws. The Department of Labor estimates that over half of the sewing factories in the United States are paying below the minimum wage (Contact 4 News, 1996, WWW). Wages in some U.S. sweatshops are estimated to be 60 cents per hour, in comparison to Haitis 30 cents per hour (Peoples Weekly, 1996, WWW). Both of these pay rates can be considered starvation wages. Another problem is that some factories use child labor to increase their profits. In Indonesia, Nike pays 12-year-old girls to make shoes 70 hours per week in a factory that reeks of glue. Over 200 million children work in factories in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Asia. ARE U.S. COMPANIES MAKING CHANGES? Fortunately, the publics outrage has forced companies to be responsible
