Sweatshops in the Past

Sweatshops aren't a recent thing, they have been found throughout history!

• 1880​ - When Jewish immigrants were going from Russia to the United States they needed to get jobs and they needed to make money. They ended up working in sweatshops with horrible, unsafe conditions. 
• ​​​1906 - A man named Upton Sinclair desperately needed money and wound up working at a meat-packing industry. There he witnessed thumbs being chopped off from the machines, blood all over the floors, and disgusting cattle gore shot out covering the workers.
• 1911 - At the the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, three of the ten stories went up in flames. This fire caused many injuries and 145 worker deaths, all because the factory had one of fire escapes locked and the workers could not get out in time.
• 1996 - Kathie Lee Gifford, the famous talk show host, had been associated with several sweatshops in New York and Honduran in 1996. Her lines that were shown at Walmart had been created in sweatshops. It was shown that in the sweatshops in Honduran, there were female workers as young as five years old who worked approximately 75 hours per week. And on top of that they were only payed the small amount of 31 cents an hour.
• 2002 - At a Toyota manufacturing sweatshop in Tokyo, one of the workers, Kenichi Uchini, had taken enough. In his fourth hour of overtime work he passed out and never woke up. During his last month, prior to his death, he had worked 106 hours of unpaid overtime work.
• 2007 - Leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China was in full blast prepare mode. It was discovered that they had four different sweatshop locations producing merchandise for the Olympics. At these sweatshops, the 12 year old's were forced to work double shifts, with punishment for taking longer than a total of 15 minutes on break per day.

​Sweatshop Timeline