Elich reports that in recent years, “the reign of free market ideology has brought a disturbing rise in sweatshop manufacturing, with conditions reminiscent of the worst of the nineteenth century.” In sweatshops that act as suppliers to big corporations like Walmart, Nike, and Adidas, employment “is akin to imprisonment. The Alejandro Apparel plant in Honduras is representative of sweatshops throughout the Third World, with its barbed-wire fence, locked gates and armed security guards. . .. [T]he firm is exempt from all taxes, import and export duties and tariffs.”9
Workers put in ten- and twelve-hour shifts, nonstop, for pennies an hour. In some plants, employees are regularly required to work unpaid overtime to meet impossibly high production quotas. “The supervisors stand over us shouting and cursing at us to go faster,” one former worker testifies. Workers spend all day toiling as fast as they can, breathing in dust particles, sweating under the factory heat, not allowed to stretch or even look to the side. “By the end of the day your whole body aches, your back, arms, shoulders, everything.”10
Elich offers other accounts of labor conditions in the free market:
In Bangladesh, workers sew garments for Disney and Walmart, earning the princely sum of 11 to 20 cents per hour. . .. The pay is so abysmal that four workers must share a single shack, and one outhouse and water pump serves sixty people. Meals consist of nothing but rice, only occasionally flavored with a small amount of beans or potatoes. To manage even such a meager diet as this, workers must borrow money each week. The workweek is fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. If a worker is caught talking in the factory, he is fined a day’s wages. “It is a bleak life. We have no hope,” confessed one worker. Another complained, “We have no life. We can’t afford to marry; we have no wife, no social life. We live just to work.”11
At the Western Dresses factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a worker reports that he worked six months straight without a single day off. “My job was to sew the flaps on the back pockets of these pants. I had to sew 120 pieces an hour. It was difficult to reach. If you made any mistakes or fell behind on your goal, they beat you. . .. This happens very often. They hit you hard.” Workers at the factory are not permitted to talk, and if they even dare to stand and stretch, their pay is cut.12 Such are some of the less publicized features of the free market paradise. (In contrast, work conditions in communist countries such as Vietnam and China were never that horrible and have been improving in recent years.)