Sweatshop

Sweatshop (or sweat factory) is a pejorative term for a workplace that has harsh/poor (socially unacceptable) working conditions. The work may be difficult, dangerous or underpaid. Workers in sweatshops may work long hours with low pay, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage; child labor laws may also be violated.

History

A sweatshop is a factory or workshop, especially in the clothing industry, where manual workers are employed at very low wages for long hours and under poor conditions.

Many workplaces through history have been crowded, low-paying and without job security; but the concept of a sweatshop originated between 1830 and 1850 as a specific type of workshop in which a certain type of middleman, the sweater, directed others in garment making (the process of producing clothing) under arduous conditions. The terms sweater for the middleman and sweat system for the process of subcontracting piecework were used in early critiques like Charles Kingsley's Cheap Clothes and Nasty, written in 1850, which described conditions in London, England. The workplaces created for the sweating system, a system of subcontracting in the tailoring trade were called sweatshops and might contain only a few workers or as many as 100 and more.

Sweatshop (disambiguation)

A sweatshop is a working environment with very difficult conditions.

Sweatshop may also refer to:

Sweatshop (retailer)

Sweatshop is a chain of running equipment shops in the United Kingdom with 44 branches (as of March 2015) and an online shop. It was founded by runner Chris Brasher in 1971, with the first shop in Teddington. Its original name was "Chris Brasher's Sporting Emporium", and changed to Sweatshop in 1978. It is now owned by Sports Direct.

Sweatshop was voted "best retailer" by readers and website visitors of the British edition of Runner's World magazine each year from 2008 to 2013.

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