Introduction Sweatshops are workplaces run by unscrupulous employers who pay low wages to workers for long hours under unsafe and unhealthy conditions. For example, in a clothing sweatshop in California in the early 2000s, Asian women sewed for ten to twelve hours per day, six or seven days per week, in a dim and unventilated factory loft where the windows were sealed and the emergency doors locked. The workers had no pension or health-care benefits and were paid at a piece rate that fell far below the legal minimum wage. When the company went bankrupt, the owner sold off the inventory, locked out the workers without paying them, moved his machines in the middle of the night to another factory, and reopened under a different name. The term “sweatshop” is derived from the “sweating system” of production and its use of “sweated labor.” At the heart of the sweating system are the contractors. A large company distributes its products to small contractors who profit from the difference between what they charge the company and what they spend on production. The work is low skilled and labor-intensive, so the contractors do best when their workers are paid the least. Workers employed under these conditions are said to be doing sweated labor. (Elliott and Freeman 2003) Sweatshops are often used in the clothing industry because it is easy to separate higher and lower skilled jobs and contract out the lower skilled ones. Clothing companies can do their own designing, marketing, and cutting, and contract out sewing and finishing work. New contractors can start up easily; all they need is a few sewing machines in a rented apartment or factory loft located in a neighborhood where workers can be recruited. Sweatshops make the most fashion-oriented clothing for women’s and girls because production has to be flexible, change quickly, and done in small batches. In less style-sensitive sectors men’s and boys’ wear, hosiery, and knit products there is less change and longer production runs, and clothing can be made competitively in large factories using advanced technology. Since their earliest days, sweatshops have relied on immigrant labor, usually women, who were desperate for work under any pay and conditions. (Singh and Zammit 2003) Sweatshops in New York City, for example, opened in Chinatown, the mostly Jewish Lower East Side, and Hispanic neighborhoods in the boroughs. Sweatshops in Seattle are near neighborhoods of Asian immigrants. History of Sweatshops The evolution of sweatshops in London and Paris two early and major centers of the garment industry followed the pattern in New York City. First, garment manufacturing was localized in a few districts: the Sentier of Paris and the Hackney, Haringey, Islington, the Tower Hamlets, and Westminster boroughs of London. Second, the sweatshops employed mostly immigrants, at first men but then primarily women, who had few job alternatives. The source of immigrant workers changed over time. During the late nineteenth and twentieth century, most workers in the garment sweatshops of Paris were Germans and Belgians, then Polish and Russian Jews and, into the 2000s, Yugoslavs, Turks, Southeast Asians, Chinese and North African Jews. Eastern European Jews initially worked in London sweatshops, but most of these workers were replaced by Cypriots and Bengali immigrants. (Elliott and Freeman 2003) Also, swe