Have You Forgotten About Sweatshops?

Time and time again we hear these horrid stories about how our clothes are made. How these inexpensive shirts we constantly buy are being made by these poor workers who have to work for more than twelve hours a day, receive little to no pay, are constantly beaten, and overall just treated as less than human. In 2006 there was an article, discussing just that, the dismal working conditions of factories located in Jordanian.  "[Us, Jordanian workers,] used to start at 8 in the morning, and…work until midnight, 1 or 2 a.m., seven days a week," exclaimed Nargis Akhter, a worker at the Paramount Garment factory just outside Amman. Now you would think, seven years later, that time has progressed, and we, as Americans, have addressed this problem.

However, just this Sunday, an article posted in the New York Times, was illustrating the exact same issues as the above article did in 2006. What is surprising is how shocked everyone is about the news. Yes, the numbers are definitely shocking, thousands of garment workers are being killed each year due to these awful working conditions, but haven’t we heard this all before? And, as such, shouldn’t we do something about it!

The thing is, just as Layna Mosley, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shares “U.S. retailers probably think that this is in the news” for now, she said, but that “the dust will settle and it will go back to normal.” Mosley’s point seems very familiar in American society. For the first couple of days American consumers will be concerned about the types of clothes they purchase, but soon the news will “settle” and people will carry on as they were, and forget all about the horrid working conditions, well until the same story appears again a couple years later. 

This continuous cycle portrays that progress has not been made. People seem to just forget about what has happened in the past. Are there other stories within American history that share similar patterns to that of these on-going sweatshops?