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Are Sweatshops Helpful

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Sweatshops The word ‘sweatshop’ in today’s world has gained a predominantly negative connotation due to the Western perspective of this establishment. The term evokes a variety of emotions from people without a great deal of understanding of what the term describes or the reasons for its existence. As always, every issue has two sides, and in the case of sweatshops, it can be viewed as either the violation of human rights and dignity or as the building blocks of a country’s economy. This raises the very pertinent question of whether sweatshops are actually helpful or harmful. This essay attempts to showcase an informed and logical argument supporting sweatshops. The US General Accounting Office (GAO) defines "sweatshop" as an "employer that …show more content…
One of the most important things to remember is that workers voluntarily choose to work in sweatshops and this must mean something. Understandably they are choosing from a bad choice set, but if this is their top choice, we must recognize that we might have misunderstood or misrepresented sweatshops. In an attempt to understand why sweatshops might seem favorable, we need to step into the shoes of the workers. Firstly, these workers live in poverty with some of the most dire and harsh conditions in the world. Usually their default job is scavenging or begging on the streets, therefore they view jobs at a sweatshop as a route that will lift them from the abject poverty that they live in. Some of the reasons why sweatshops seem like a favorable option to people are the wages are higher that the average paid in those countries, work is not as tedious and dangerous as some of the other jobs, they work under a roof and not under the scorching sun and work at a garment industry is considered as a good social status and the job is stable than other

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