Are Sweatshops Coming To America?

Ever wonder how Amazon.com gets you a product in three days or less?

(Source)

Amazon.com is probably one of the most successful and fastest growing companies in the United States, and is the world’s largest online retailer.

In between corporate favoritism, crushing inflation, globalization, and ObamaCare making full-time workers cost prohibitive, will the United States adopt the China model in order to stay competitive?

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12 thoughts on “Are Sweatshops Coming To America?”

    1. This.
      Also, you both support and oppose the same thing in your entire premise.
      Not as well thought out as your regular stuff Roosh.

  1. There have been several articles out there, one recently in the LA Times, (link below) about how bad the working conditions are in the big Amazon distribution centers. Apparently they’re very hot in summer, and the workers are put under enormous stress for order filling in a timely fashion.
    With all the running around and heat, these places sound less like a sweat shop and more like a salt mine.
    Makes me think twice about ordering from them. I get as much of my modest product-purchasing needs as I can locally, especially books from local sellers, but I do order stuff from Amazon with some regularity.

    1. Work is hard. Maybe Amazon could pay more, but it will be a sad day for those workers when they don’t have spend all rushing around the hot warehouse…because they have been replaced by robots.

  2. Anecdata: I tried working at a manufacturing shop last summer in New Jersey. The guys there regularly worked 11 hour days with only occasional short smoke breaks (they usually brought their lunch and ate while working). The roar of the machines could be deafening and you had to be on your feet pretty much the whole time. The job I had paid $11 per hour (with time-and-a-half for overtime) and required previous knowledge and training in manufacturing.
    I lasted 9 weeks there.

  3. Very unlikely, unless it is heavily exploited illegal immigrant labor, and even then only temporary. The fact is that robotics and automation are just getting better every year. Eventually we’ll have factories that don’t require workers. The factories will come back, but the jobs won’t.
    In other news, wages are going up in China so fast that China itself is outsourcing factories to the ASEAN countries (Vietnam, Thailand, etc). So Chinese are making stuff to sell to America in order to buy stuff from Southeast Asia. This won’t last.
    There really isn’t any cheap wage place to build factories where the people have the necessary skills and will to work. Comparatively high wages for factory workers everywhere will incentivize more automation. This will lead to a massive global economic realignment and basically abolish the factory worker as a class.

  4. If you’ve watched the movie Fast Food Nation, you’d see the food manufacturing/packaging industry deals with the same conditions. That movie is a bit skewed and off the mark however as it merely infers that only fast food meat packaging is corrupt when it is in actuality other types of food packaging/farming industries related to veggies, fruits, cereals, peanut butter, etc that are exposed to those insane working conditions.

  5. Sweatshop work seems better than cubicle hell. I bet nobody makes you go to diversity sensitivity training in a sweatshop.

  6. Honestly, when I think sweatshop, at ‘best’ I’m thinking of McDonalds. Certainly not a largely automated book warehouse that is certainly climate controlled.

  7. There are already “sweatshops” in America – usually located in ethnic enclaves with immigrant women as workers.

  8. I work as a supervisor at one of Amazon’s warehouses. This is 100% accurate—that looks like my actual job site.
    Shit is brutal, “mandatory overtime” (oxymoron?)=60 hour workweeks during peak Christmas season, then massive layoffs. My actual job is to walk 10-12 people out the door each day. They use staffing agencies so they don’t have to provide severance or unemployment. Breaks are short and infrequent–15 minutes 2x a day, including the 5 minute walk to and from your workstation = really a 5 minute break. The pickers (the ones that fetch the items from those rows of bins to fill the order before it gets packed and shipped) wear pedometers, and average 12-15 miles walked per day. The packers must meet an hourly rate of 200 items packed per hour. Do the math—that’s more than 3 boxes per minute, all day everyday EACH. While standing at a desk (no sitting is allowed EVER) and not able to see or speak to anyone for the entire day.
    The only non-sweatshop aspect is that the workers get $11-14 per hour, depending on location and cost of living. Not too bad, but it is very physically demanding.

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