The article “If You Care about Women, It Might Be Time to Think Twice about Where You Shop” by Meghan DeMaria states that 97% of clothing sold in the United States is imported, according to a report from the American Apparel & Footwear Association. Many cheap clothing items are made by workers in poor conditions, with low wages and most of those workers are women. As Liana Foxvog, director of organizing and communications at the International Labor Rights Forum, explained to Mic, “Factory owners prefer to hire female workers because they believe that not only are they better suited for sewing with their smaller hands, but that they're also more docile and, therefore, willing to work longer hours for less pay, without organizing or trying to change their conditions.” Women also face long hours and potential workplace injuries in poor conditions, as well as sexism and discrimination on the job. Foxvog says that “many women in the garment industry aren't given their legally owed maternity leave or are subject to …show more content…
This same issue is also portrayed in a documentary called “Made in L.A.”, in which women workers in garment industry had to work 10 to 14 hours a day, often denied them to eat, and using restrooms, and they had to contend with unpaid wages and overtime. In both the article and the documentary women workers had to struggle for basic economic justice. In the documentary, Maria was fighting due to working conditions, a meager salary, and domestic abuse that left her struggling for her children’s future. Maura was fighting to support her children who were back in El-Salvador. In the article, women in Cambodia were actually fighting for their unborn child because when they become visibly pregnant they were either fired or forced to have an abortion. In both cases families or children are the main reason for their fight for economic
“Working Women and the Triangle Fire” by Elizabeth Burt begins by providing detailed information about hard-working, exploited women in the labor force. The article describes previous attempts of women factory workers to organize to protest injustice, and also explains that “the press had sporadically covered these attempts” (Burt 190). Next, the author provides specific examples of the work of journalists who wrote about frustrated women workers, but states that these articles mainly appeared in the women’s sections of newspapers. Workers had the most success by participating in labor actions (Burt 190). The article describes that when the press covered most labor movements, focus was placed on negotiations, violence, or the character of the
Most of them were new immigrants. Young Jewish women from Eastern Europe and Catholic women from Italy. Von Drehle says in his book, “they were underpaid and overworked, but also independent, resolute and freethinking.” They were alone in the city working six long days a week, and sending all the money back home and keeping nothing for themselves. But, just a year earlier, these women had walked out of their jobs, activating a strike that called for better work conditions.
These young women,many being immigrants, worked six or seven days a week for wages of approximately $5, crammed into dark spaces with little ventilation . This factory like so many others was owned and run by men who were more interested in males working in the higher-paid jobs, while assuming women were less skilled and less willing to fight for equality. “The shops are unsanitary - that's the word that is generally used, but there ought to be a worse one used. Whenever we tear or damage any of the goods we sew on, or whenever it is found damaged after we are through with it, whether we have done it or not, we are charged for the piece and sometimes for a whole yard of the material. ”(7).
Many people who worked in these factories were immigrant women who were willing to work for next to nothing and did not know how to fight the unfair treatment they received. “Roughly two million Eastern European Jewish immigrants entered the United States between 1881 and the end of WW1. One of the largest and most influential migrations in history (Drehle10).” “Eighteen thousand immigrants per month poured into New York City alone and there were no public agencies to help them (Drehle 12).” Immigrants faced extreme poverty.
In an era of limited rights for women and minorities, social worker Florence Kelley delivers a persuasive speech to a live audience at the Philadelphia convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Through repetition of important details, along with harrowing examples of awful working conditions, the author brings to light the issues of child labor and invites listeners to empathize. She then employs rhetorical questions to deliver a scathing critique of the carelessly permissive labor laws in place. In doing so, she creates a convincing argument that emphasizes the need to change child labor laws in the United States, and beckons the present listener to take action and join her cause.
These women worked in deplorable working conditions, for a ludicrous number of hours each week, and earned meager compensation. Although to modern readers, the women’s working conditions alone seem horrific, at this time, these conditions were far from uncommon across factories in
Women and children have to work in a very bad situation long in a dangerous and unhealthy environment for a long hours. Most of them couldn’t bare the situation and got sick, but still they have to work to keep their
Women Fighting for Justice “When you deprive people of their right to live in dignity, to hope for a better future, to have control over their lives, when you deprive them of that choice, then you expect them to fight for these rights.” – Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan. The missions of all of these activists is summed up in this. All of them are strong women who fought for what they believed in: Mother Jones fought for children’s working rights; Harriet Tubman fought for African Americans and racial equality; and Kimberly Bryant is fighting to help get more African American girls into the IT industry.
This collective biography recounts the lives of Fannia Cohn, Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman and Clara Lemlich Shavelson, four working-class, immigrant, activist women who organized to dismantle state-sponsored class-based and gender-based oppression and to improve the lives of working-class women beginning in the 1900s. Having immigrated from Eastern Europe to New York City amid the women's labor uprisings of the early 1900s, each woman took in the protests, boycotts and unionizing happening around them as a call to action and remained active in the working-class movement through the 1960's. Orleck summarizes her reason for choosing these four women as a quest to give faces and names to the many working-class women whose stories are buried underneath layers of white, bourgeois feminism or the heaps of stories about sexist, white men fighting against class inequality. Orleck hopes Common Sense
Most women were expected to work on the farms or in the household and to raise children. When industry came to the country, it provided women the opportunity to seek new environments. However, women’s tough transition did not come with welcome arms by the country. “If you don’t think there’s a difference (between women wearing slacks and skirts), put on a Consolidated uniform and try getting service at your favorite store, make a reservation, or get information at the post office,” (Bowman Reid, 67). This quote explains that some women were refused service for wearing slacks and working in factories.
This goes to show that agriculture truly is more than just “cows, plows and sows”! Women in other countries who make our clothing are contributing to the agriculture industry as well. Women are needed in the agriculture industry now, more than ever. According to the 2011 Hunger Report, “the low social, economic, and political status of women in many parts of the developing world, particularly rural women, contributes to high rates of food insecurity and malnutrition”.
“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time” (Grace Abbott). The issue of child labor has been around for centuries. Its standing in our world has been irrevocably stained in our history and unfortunately, our present. Many great minds have assessed this horrific issue and its effect on our homes, societies, and ultimately, our world.
Women from the Philippines, Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand and Korea depart their homes in the search for a better life for their children and family. Today women travel to wealthy countries like the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom take jobs as nannies leaving their children behind to be taken care by mother's, aunt and sometimes even orphanages. These women sacrifice the love they are expected to give to their children to provide material goods to ensure their survival and flourishing in today's society. These women sell their love for children in rich countries so that their own children can have a life similar to that of the children they learn to live in the absence of their own children. Love has become a good that is extracted from poor countries to that of the wealthy countries as described by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell
Dana Seitler argued that “it is not a monster, but often a mother who negotiates, threatens, and ultimately restores a sense of cultural survival and national futurity to the social world” (Seitler 63). By this she means that in spite of women being treated differently than what was considered the male “norm,” women were ultimately in charge of the shift in power that was soon to come forth. Also, the way women were treated served as an escape for feministic views and “exciting proof of the on-going fight for liberation” (Seitler 63). As time went by, the structure of society began to shift with women fighting for their rights, as well as rights to be able to work a job. As the world began to be more industrialized, with women participating
Women. Women’s involvement in the working world have contributed to many items that would be missing from the world today; if they had not been allowed to work.. Women have struggled with sexism in the workplace since before they were even given the chance to try to work. They were taught from a young age that their job was to provide children, cook, and clean for their husbands, while the husband worked and provided the money. What men did not know however was that women were capable of so much more(Jewell, Hannah).