Child Sweatshop Labor

The topic I am going to write on for hypertext #2 is Child Labor in Sweatshops of Third World Countries. I know that this topic is a very salient issue and I know that it is very widespread and has the potential to be extremely vague. I didn’t want to put my topic in an extremely specific time or place, so I narrowed it down by examining the presence of child labor in third world countries. I want to look particularly in sweatshops. From the books that we have been reading for class by Enhrenreich, Schlossler, and Shipler, I have begun thinking in depth about the different aspects of a low wage life. I think that this topic fits perfectly into what I have learned about the low wage life. Schlossler’s book, “Fast Food Nation” highlights the idea that corporations employ teenagers purposely for many reasons (26). He discusses that these corporations like McDonald’s seek out teenagers for their tendency to obey, and their compliance with the low wage and ridiculous hours that are often in store for fast food workers. This idea translates directly to my topic, it is just an exaggerated version of Schlosser’s hypothesis. The idea that children are submissive and vulnerable, is the reason that they provide them with little or no wages, for ridiculous hours. It is even harder for the child sweatshop labor in third world countries because usually there is no strong, successful government to enforce any child labor laws, or to increase the general standard of living through a strong economy. Reading Shipler’s book, “The Working Poor”, I have begun to understand the vicious cycle that is poverty. As Shipler states, “it is very expensive to be poor”(11). It is even more impossible when you start at this level of poverty as a child, and they wear you out before it is even time to start struggling on your own. Barbara Ehrenreich social experiment that spurned her to write, “Nickel and Dimed”, showed me a lot about how point of view makes such a difference in the attempt to “report on a lived experience”. The way that she brings the character to life through her first person narrative really gave me some perspective on how I want to tell the story of these children.