Three of this country’s most profitable companies by revenue — Walmart, Apple, and Amazon — operate sweatshops in the United States and in the Global South. There, workers often get minimum pay and severe punishment for seeking rights in the workplace.
Walmart, the largest company in the world by revenue, is known for its failure to provide U.S. and supplier workers safe conditions. In 2005, a class suit filed against the company in Missouri stated that 160,000 to 200,000 people had been forced to work off the clock. Workers were also denied overtime pay and weren’t allowed to take rest and lunch breaks.
In 2018, the National Labor Relations Board ordered Walmart the to stop threatening workers who supported strikes or participated in union organizing activities. According to the article, the company spends $1.5 million in legal actions a year to keep workers from joining labor organizations. In October, an op-ed published in Fortune by a Walmart associate stated that coworkers with COVID-19 symptoms had been afraid to call in sick because they didn’t have protected time off and feared they could lose their job. During the pandemic, 22 workers had lost their lives due to the virus. The company still has not provided an end-to-end testing apparatus, tests for asymptomatic workers, or infection data to any of its 1.5 million workers.
According to a report by the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, released in 2016, based on interviews with 344 workers, those working for Walmart’s supplier factories, mostly in Cambodia, had been subjected to sexual harassment and highly exploitative contacts that forced workers to other unsafe working conditions such as low wages, denial of benefits, threats, denial of water breaks and penalties for engaging in union activity.
The Guardian also reported in 2017 that workers in sweatshops run by Apple in China had committed suicide due to harsh working conditions in what has come to be known as “iPhone City” where as many as 350,000 workers work to assemble iPhones. A young man who had worked there described it as “not a good place for human beings.” Management there had been described as aggressive and only giving out normal pay for overtime work. Reportedly, workers felt that high-pressure environments and exploitation had been normalized, with depression and suicide among workers being inevitable.
Throughout its history, Amazon has been criticized for its treatment of workers in workplaces run in the United States and overseas. In 2001 (just seven years after Amazon was founded), the company laid off 850 employees in Seattle after a unionization drive. The Washington Alliance Of Technological Workers accused the company of intimidating workers the same year. In many cases, Amazon has also chosen to have many workers risk their lives so their products can be made. During the COVID-19 pandemic this year, hourly wages for Amazon workers didn’t increase any more than $2. After a report in March was released claiming that two employees had been infected by the virus in a Staten Island warehouse, workers there claimed that the number had been higher. When a walkout occurred demanding the warehouse temporarily close, the main organizer behind it was fired. In the middle of all this, the warehouse continued to operate.
In October, an Amazon fulfillment center and delivery station in California was fined nearly $2,000 each for failing to provide substantial protections for workers from potentially getting the virus. It was reported that employees had not been made aware of what work stations had been sanitized and what objects in the workplace had been frequently touched.
At the delivery station which had been cited in the report, an employee had ended up dying due to COVID-19. However, contracted delivery drivers had received no notifications of confirmed cases at Amazon facilities according to the report, although the company had revealed the same month that nearly 20,000 front-line employees had contacted COVID-19 from March to September.
A report from China Labor Watch in 2018 stated that workers in an Amazon plant in Hengyang, China had suffered working conditions that are illegal under Chinese law — remarking that all workers were underpaid and subject to safety hazards and verbal abuse. The report stated that employees had been required to work more than 100 hours a week and pointed out that staff dormitories there lacked adequate safety precautions.
All of this may be shocking, even though it is public knowledge. So why hasn’t much been done about this? The reason is that contemporary sweatshops are products of an American capitalist system that doesn’t let workers have a share in owning the means of production while putting exploitation and profit over workers’ and human rights. And under this system, the product being made by the worker is put above the worker’s well-being and their life in general.
The activist and radio host Bill Resnick in his essay “Socialism or Nike” wrote in 1997 about how multinational companies represented the “new economic model and the world it is making” noting that transferring “low-paid menial production work to the Third World” gave the U.S. economy and ultimately, the Government, an advantage so as many as those jobs wouldn’t be done in the United States. He also pointed out that foreign corporate investments in Global South countries dehumanized workers there, citing that in the twenty years prior, Mexican workers’ wages had fallen by 50% after the nation had received them.
The Monthly Review also reported in 2002 that sweatshops were “an instrument for capitalist development,” pointing out that sweatshops helped benefit capitalists by providing low pay. The article also noted that capitalists thrive when workers have to compete for limited resources. openDemocracy also wrote in 2015 about how transnational companies used global supply chains to pressure workforces in advanced capitalist countries to accept cuts in wages or have their work be outsourced.
Because capitalism gives power only to the wealthy, when the system is put in practice, it allows those high up in companies to exploit workers. The openDemocracy article pointed out that as of 2006, U.S. workers worked longer on average than any other industrialized country, even though wages have decreased for the typical male worker in America from $48,000 a year in the late 1970s to $33,000 a year in 2010. If workers aren’t provided for in the United States, then it’s not surprising to see multinational companies in the country continue the exploitation that begins here through global supply chains.
The German philosopher Karl Marx explained in his works how capitalism couldn’t thrive for the elite without abuses being committed. The famous “exploitation theory” outlined in his landmark, three-volume work Das Kapital (published from 1867-1894) wrote about how capitalists appropriated one’s labor even when the labor having to be done would ultimately exceed someone’s capability. He also pointed out that because capitalists own the means of production (such as businesses) and workers only control their labor, the worker ends up being forced to submit to exploitation. And we’re seeing that scenario take place in sweatshops run by these companies in the United States and abroad.
While there are measures that an ordinary person can take to avoid companies that run sweatshops (as shown in a list by GreenPages.org), what’s ultimately to be realized is that as long as capitalism continues to exist, sweatshops and worker exploitation will continue to be prevalent as businesses depend on it to profit.
