Sweatshops Quotes

Another problem about writing about politics in the "age of globalization" is that so much of the violence in the form of war and also in the forms of institutional violence - sweatshops, child labor, victimization of people economically - happens elsewhere and out of sight. And when we do know about it and need to witness it, it's always mediated by images of one kind or another, so you're kind of stuck trying to write about what it's like trying to be you living your life thinking about and experiencing this stuff in that way.

I will use all my influence in trying to remove from our factory system the cruelties which are practiced in our mills.

Conditions in Chinese factories are harsh. They're much harsher than they are in, for instance, the United States or any Western nation.

The defining moment in American economic history is when Bill Clinton lobbied to get China into the World Trade Organization. It was the worst political and economic mistake in American history in the last 100 years. China went into the World Trade Organization and agreed to play by certain rules. Instead, they are illegally subsidizing their exports, manipulating their currency, stealing all of our intellectual property, using sweatshops, using pollution havens. What happens is, our businesses and workers are playing that game with two hands tied behind their back.

In 1901 children in industry was not a small problem. In the textile factories in the United Kingdom over 32,000 children from 12 years of age were being employed on the half-time system; in addition, many thousands of children of 13 years upwards, were employed full-time – 60 hours a week – as industrial workers, in non-textile factories and workshops. The number of children engaged in their own homes on some of the sweated trades of those days could not be counted. The illegal employment of children in factories was also prevalent. The hours of employment permissible under the Factory Acts in 1901 were long. Women and girls over 14 years could be employed 12 hours a day and on Saturday 8 hours. In addition, in certain industries, and dressmaking was one, an additional 2 hours could be worked by women on 30 nights in any 12 months.

Free trade should not mean free labor.

When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.

He would not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

It is a debasement of our common humanity that must be called by its true name, modern slavery …. When a woman is locked in a sweatshop, or trapped in a home as a domestic servant, alone and abused and incapable of leaving—that’s slavery.

Whatever happened to the good ole days, when children worked in factories?

There are literally billions of people on the planet who live in an unimaginable poverty that's not in any way different from the plight of the people in Orchid. And you can't have the splendor of Rodeo Drive without the sweatshops of Indonesia; those two things go hand in hand.

[Developing country] sweatshops, where the conditions are admittedly appalling by Western standards, represent an improvement -- often a significant improvement -- over the alternatives available to their workers. To boycott them or impose other significant additional costs on them makes life worse for many poor people by depriving them of relatively good jobs. This is especially true for women in the developing world, for whom rural life is often far worse than industrial labor in cities.

Under the guise of trade deals and trade agreements, its [free trade] really been used to keep workers in the world suppressed in terms of their wages or qualities of life.

The competitive pressure to produce, buy, and sell to our global multi-national companies is so intense that contractors in supply chains are motivated to pay low wages, intensify exploitative conditions, keep workers fearful with insecure work contracts, or simply sack workers who have formed a union to fight back.

It Is Not Linen You're Wearing Out But Human Creatures' Lives.

If this goes into sweatshop labor, I'm quitting this podcast.

People don't really believe that their computer or sneakers are made by small hands, a child's hands, or a person who is living such a miserable life. They somehow think that, no, that person has a tough life, but it's an OK life.

I think that perhaps if I looked through the sweatshops myself, we might be in a condition to put things on a new basis, just as … in the police department after you and I began our midnight tours.

The memory of the 146 people who lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire stands as a reminder that legal protections and workplace safety standards were won through a long struggle for social justice and at great human cost.

I have an idea for sweatshops: air conditioning! That's simple. 14 year old boys working twelve hour days? "Yeah, but they're comfortable!"

Right here in New York, people are struggling in working conditions not much safer or fairer than the sweatshops of 1911.

In some ways, [the student anti-sweatshop movement] is like the anti-apartheid movement, except that in this case its striking at the core of the relations of exploitation. Much of this was initiated by Charlie Kernaghan of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights.

Child labour may be distasteful to westerners, but does boycotting goods made with child labour improve or exacerbate the lot of third world children? Trusting the market to regulate may not ultimately be in our interest.

Because of GLHR's crusades... we're beginning to learn the awful truth about workers around the world who are slaving away their lives in sweatshops, who are denied the right to join or form a union in order to fight back and provide a better life for their families.

There are practices which most people believe should be ended. They include … the shifting of actual production form one locality or region to another in pursuit of the cheapest wage scale.