By common agreement, a sweatshop is a workplace that provides low or subsistence wages under harsh working conditions, such as long hours, unhealthy conditions, and/ or an oppressive environment. Some...

By common agreement, a sweatshop is a workplace that provides low or subsistence wages under harsh working conditions, such as long hours, unhealthy conditions, and/ or an oppressive environment. Some observers see these work environments as essentially acceptable if the laborers freely contract to work in such conditions. For others, to call a workplace a sweatshop implies that the working conditions are illegitimate and immoral. The U.S. General Accounting Office would hone this definition for U.S. workplaces to include those environments where an employer violates more than one federal or state labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers’ compensation, or industry registration laws. The AFL-CIO Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees would expand on that to include workplaces with systematic violations of global fundamental workers’ rights. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) defines sweatshops much more broadly than either of these; even where a factory is clean, well organized, and harassment free, the ICCR considers it a sweatshop if its workers are not paid a sustainable living wage. The purpose of reviewing these varied definitions is to acknowledge that, by definition, sweatshops are oppressive, unethical, and patently unfair to workers.