Critical Thinking

On my first Y&TW project SLATE Post which you can find here. I talked about how sweatshop workers, work under horrible conditions, work long tiring hours and get paid very little for their labor. There was a article I read about a little girl named Meem who works at a Bangladesh sweatshop and she got to tell the world her story and how she got to where she is now.  In my last post I also talked about where the word sweatshops come from and where sweatshops originated from. You can also find shops that support sweatshops/child labor that most people today buy items from. Are you shopping for sweatshop?

In my last SLATE Post I added a picture where you get to see how much sweatshop workers around the world make hourly. After seeing how much sweatshop workers  make over the world I started wondering what were people from these countries personal savings? I decided to look at Bangladesh and Vietnam. I picked these two countries because they’re both pay the least amount of money to their workers compared to other countries.  

I used this website to find out the average personal savings for someone who lives in Bangladesh.  Turns out the average personal savings are $52.20, but the sweatshop workers in Bangladesh make $0.13 an hour and don’t really have the opportunity to save their money.  The website I used for Vietnam’s average savings was this one.  The average personal savings in Vietnam is $4.35 and sweatshop workers get paid $0.26 an hour.  Though Vietnam's personal savings is lower than Bangladesh, I would say the both countries sweatshop workers are in the same potion were since they get paid very little they both don’t have the opportunity to save their money.

I wanted to know how my peers felt about sweatshops and where do students from the United States knowledge on sweatshop is. How I went about this is making a survey on google forms and asking the following questions; Which stores do you shop in for clothes? Check all that apply,Look at the tags on the clothing you have on right now write down below the country where each piece of clothing was made, In your own words, how would you define a sweatshop?, Do you think there are sweatshops in the USA?,  Would you buy brand goods if you knew they were made in sweatshops?, If you had the power, would you shut down all the sweatshops in the world?

What I learned about from all my responses is that most people are educated on the subject of sweatshops.  I was actually surprised because when I would bring it up in class or when I learned about it last year in my middle school most to all people didn’t have a clue about sweatshops.  However what really caught my attention was the question responses.  Question; If you had the power, would you shut down all the sweatshops in the world? I thought many people would have just “Yes of course they are awful!” etc. But that wasn’t the case.  These are a few of the responses that caught my eye; “I don't really know what I would do because many people who already can barely support themselves would lose their jobs.”, “I would shut down all the sweatshops but then that would mean that we would have to find another way to make fast clothing with higher pay and better working conditions. Which might seem easy but won't be at all.” and “Ehh... maybe, but the economy as I know it would probably collapse. Ethically it should be done, but it has to be a slow process.” I loved how many of the people in my responses were thinking outside the box.  

I think the point where I am now is what will I do you I can inform other about this topic?  And that brings me to my Agent Of Change. I think what I want to do is have a protest near the liberty place mall area because there are a lot of clothing stores there that have sweatshops and we can help people know what they’re truly supporting. I thought this because from my responses it smells like people have general idea about sweatshops but they know know how to go about the problem and I want to be the one to push the conversion out to the public.

Annotated Bibliography