WHO | sweatshops

Who is getting Exploited?

People all around the world is suffering in global economic slowdown. Considering that you are living in Hong Kong, you might have seen house and food pricing gets higher and higher, in which for us, it is stressful. However, in poor countries, the poor is tortured more than before for a tiny portion of food for their families to survive one day.

Most of the time, these workers are females, and they are forced to be in the sweatshop 7 days a week, 70 hours of work time, and a small dormitory shared with six to seven people. As a price for working hard, they earn 10-20 cents for an hour, compared to the US, for example, earning 9-15 dollars for an hour.

Not only adults are involved in sweatshops. The International Labor Organisation (ILO) estimated that 250 million children are working in sweatshops in developing countries. More than half of the children are in Asia, 30 percent in Africa and less than 10 percent in other countries.

There are a lot of sweatshops around the world, and most of them are focused in Asia, specifically in China, India, and in Africa. These sweatshops start from companies that needs cheap workers to famous companies in which wants to earn more money. These are the lists that they do on people.

Toys
A lot of toys are made in sweatshops. Especially toys made in countries like China, Malaysia, Thailand or Vietnam. The average North American toy maker earns $11 an hour, compared to China labourers, where toy workers earn an average of 30 cents an hour.

Please watch this starting from 5:00 to 12:00.

Lists of products they produce:

Shoes
Many types of shoes are made in sweatshops. Most shoes from different brand sneakers and boots come from these sweatshops.
Child labor is also very common in the shoe industry.
Clothing
Clothing is very often made in sweatshops and with the use of child labor.
Majority of the garment workers are non-local women that work 60-80 hours a week, paid usually way below minimum wage or overtime pay. Overseas, garment workers routinely make less than a living wage, working under oppressive conditions.
Rugs
A lot of child labor is used in the rug industry. Nearly one million children are illegally employed making hand-knotted rugs worldwide.