Nineteenth-century middlemen sweated workers by extracting their labor at the lowest possible rate.
The verb to sweat, when applied to labor, dates to the early seventeenth century. By the 1850s, English usage had produced the sweater, a middleman who contracted work from manufacturers and extracted it from laborers at the lowest possible rate.1 The sweater profited not by adding value but by compressing wages.
The compound sweatshop entered English around 1892, describing the cramped workshops where this system operated.2 Workers in London's East End and New York's Lower East Side, many of them recent immigrants, sewed garments in tenement rooms for fourteen or more hours a day.
In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York killed 146 garment workers, most of them young immigrant women. Exit doors had been locked to prevent unauthorized breaks. The disaster catalyzed labor reform in the United States, leading to new fire safety codes and factory inspection laws.3
The word reappeared in public consciousness in the 1990s as globalization moved garment production to countries with lower labor costs. Investigations revealed conditions in factories supplying major American and European brands that echoed nineteenth-century workshops: long hours, minimal pay, and locked exits.
In 2013, the Rana Plaza garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed, killing over 1,100 workers.4 It was the deadliest garment-factory disaster in history. Workers had reported cracks in the building the day before and were ordered back to their sewing machines.