When most people think of sweatshops, they usually think that clothing and footwear are the only products that are made in sweatshops. However, other items, such as coffee, tea, rugs and carpets, toys, sports items, and fruits and vegetables, are manufactured under sweatshop conditions. Although labor like picking coffee beans is not conducted inside a factory but outside in a field, there is the same forced labor, long hours, and miniscule salaries, which are considered sweatshop conditions. Some of the coffee companies with sweatshop type conditions are Starbucks, Nestle Enterprises, and Philip Morris Companies, which produce Maxwell House Coffee. There are no definite tea companies who enforce labor similar to the labor in sweatshops, but the company Lipton has been suspected of doing this since the company does not have a code of conduct prohibiting child labor, and they constantly change their estates for tea growing.
Many questions arise on the topic of why there are sweatshops.
One main reason is that the company owners are very greedy, and do not want to give up many of their profits to workers, so that is why laborers' pay is low, and conditions are so awful. There are also huge amounts of pressure on the manufacturers to produce items fast, and in large quantities. The Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire Solutions to Sweatshops Personal Opinions People mourning the dead who were killed by a sweatshop fire. A political cartoon displaying the idea of being trapped in a sweatshop.