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Lower East Side Tenement Museum

91 Orchard Street
New York, NY
10002

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The Sweatshop Debate

While workers, reformers, government agencies, and consumers all agreed sweatshops were a serious problem, everyone had different ideas about who was responsible and what should be done about it.

From many workers’ point of view, the problem of long hours and low wages was best solved by negotiating a good price for the job from the manufacturer. Sweatshop workers and bosses even occasionally banded together to negotiate the best deal.

Reformist journalists such as Rose Pastor Stokes, took up their cause: ” ‘…Poverty, and misery, and insecurity,’ said Nat, ‘are not things that a cruel God put into the world to punish us for our sins…We need not suffer poverty! What a world-shattering idea. We - we the workers - will change it all someday…The how or when we didn’t know, but the seed was planted.’”

Factory Inspectors believed the solution was to pass laws to protect workers. “There is no relief for them,” they claimed, “unless the law steps in and aids them.”

But the inspectors also held in obvious distain those they intended to protect: “the very dregs of foreign immigrants always settle in NY…thousands live and die in the tenement quarter as oblivious to the civilization typified by Broadway and 5th Avenue as if they had remained in some Russian village.” And, “…the dinginess, squalor and filth surrounding them is abominable.”

Even some reformers described immigrant workers as a “dirtier class of people,” decrying the “General animality, morality, and mentality of the toiling worker in the sweaters den” and the “low moral and low intelligence, where the condition of human beings is scarcely above that of animals.”

The Consumers’ League of New York, a reformist organization led by middle-class women, believed nothing would change without consumer action. They argued that sweatshops posed a great danger to consumers all over the country: “To the consumers the dangers are the exposure to the contagion of tuberculosis and the probability that vermin will be carried in their clothing.”

The League also tried to instill a sense of social responsibility, insisting that “the consumer, if he has a conscience, will not be gratified to know that in order to save for him a little money, his neighbors are working and existing in ignorance, disease, and filth.”