In fact, our own U.S. Department of Labor tells us that:
50% of garment factories in the U.S. violate two or more basic labor laws, establishing them as sweatshops. Sweatshops exist wherever there is an opportunity to exploit workers who lack the knowledge and resources to stand up for themselves. Typical sweatshop employees, ninety percent of whom are women, are young and uneducated. Many of them are recent or undocumented immigrants who are unaware of their legal rights. Young women throughout the world are subject to horrible working conditions and innumerable injustices because corporations, many of which are U.S.-owned, can get away with it."[11]
One thing is clear, as George told us long ago:
And so, whatever be the character of the improvement (of machinery), its benefit, land being monopolized, must ultimately go to the owners of land. [12]
New Yorkers, of course, long ago mostly stopped working on actual land, so the owners are those who own the land where their factories reside, and pay so little for the privilege, that they can exploit garment workers at subsistence wages, or less, even here, in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
When even these owners finally cannot make a profit having factories in New York, they, or their competitors, find new land abroad, displace the peasants from that, and send them to work in new factories in distant lands where the sight of suffering workers, or workers leaping to their deaths from fires, will not upset squeamish Americans.
Women, in particular, are subject to grueling labor conditions, often enticed with false promises to leave their home countries, only to have their passports and money confiscated when they arrive in Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern countries. They are subject to sexual and physical abuse, being bought and sold like slaves, and incarceration. Often, their wages are under a dollar a day. [13]
It gets still worse.
In
Myanmar - formerly known as Burma - villagers can be rounded up at
anytime, forced to work on roads, pipelines, or whatever else the
military Junta deems necessary to satisfy its customers including China, where
it is not presenting a humanistic face for the West. People who refuse are beaten, often to death, imprisoned,
and tortured. [14]
In this country, we do not call this Labor, we call it Slavery, for that is what it is. George, who saw American chattel slavery ended in his lifetime, would have recognized this form of slavery instantly. It is also beyond the scope of this paper to prove this, but it is my feeling that conditions of enforced labor have reached a level of depravity and abuse even worse than in George's time. The ferocious hunger for the world's diminishing resources, combined with the ready supply of people considered disposable by dictatorships in favor of resources throughout history has made vicious brutality a business practice in parts of the world Americans would prefer not to imagine, even if they could.
One cannot consider the condition of labor without considering the value of the Land they labor upon, as George stressed relentlessly from Progress and Poverty forwards. In fact, he makes the point that a laborer cut off from the fruits of Land is actually worse off than a slave:
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