Sweatshops In Australia Essay

Background heading
Sweatshops are a highly controversial aspect of the fashion industry. Large companies are operating them and making extremely large profits. Employees at sweatshops are forced into working shifts with exceptionally low pay and harsh conditions.
Support Endless Greed
Sweatshops are a direct product of a greedy society. Sweatshops are created by companies in foreign countries looking to pay less tax and less wages whilst making a large profit. Sweatshops are encouraging today’s society to be greedy because they influence people to purchase to buy exceptionally cheap clothing made from a 3rd world country instead of paying more money for something that was made in Australia. Companies are continuously releasing new fashion lines
for a cheap price thereby encouraging people to constantly buy the newest trends for the cheapest prices. Feminism
Sweatshops require their employees to have skills that women generally have such as sewing and knitting. Women in 3rd world countries have much fewer job options, therefore they have no other choice but to work in sweatshops. Another reason towards why females have to resort to sweatshops is that when they were adolescents they were not given an education. The audience that the large companies are aiming at are generally women who live in Australia but who cannot afford expensive designer clothing. As a result, it is by exploiting women in 3rd world countries that enables companies to exploit women in western countries.

Environmental impacts
The environment is widely impacted by sweatshops because of the large use of cotton that is contaminating the rivers with chromium.
Everyday people are drinking water out of rivers without knowing that the water is strongly contaminated and life threatening. Factories that control sweatshops are based in poor third world countries, these countries generally have very loose, if at all any environmental rules or regulations and as such most of these factories engage in high polluting work practises including smoke and gas emissions, pollution of water and inappropriate dumping of chemicals and rubbish.

Human rights breaches
The human rights commission has set universal standards for the treatment of workers. These standards are often ignored or unable to be enforced in many poor 3rd world counties. As such, workers can find themselves being continually abused and subjected to inappropriate working conditions. The human rights charter is simply unable to be enforced in countries where work practises are not regulated. In 2013 the Rana Plaza collapsed due to bad manufacturing. When workers asked to leave the factory because of fears that the building was going to collapse, the guards refused them access to evacuate the building. Not long after, the building collapsed resulting in over 3000 deaths. This is clear evidence that sweatshops are unjust and need to be
stopped.

Conclusion
In conclusion I strongly believe that sweatshops contribute to a greedy society by allowing companies to exploit workers by paying very low wages which intern allow the companies to generate huge profits. Without any laws or regulations to govern the operations of sweatshops, sweatshops will continue to expand because of the inherent greed of companies and western society in general.