Yes, I suppose so! Technically with child labor too!

We just call them factories here though, not sweat shops. They have varying levels of working conditions, and child labor has been more or less eliminated.

Some are awful, and others are quite OK! I’ve personally had worse jobs than the OK ones. Some have integrated housing too, I knew someone that designed it. The ones they designed looked quite reasonable, at least – I’ve unambiguously lived worse places. You won’t save much money working for an OK sweatshop, but you will accumulate a small pension, eat, have a place to live, and get 2 weeks vacation a year (usually accompanied with a bonus equal to a month’s pay). Most people I know see them as a sort of always-available job that’s the closest thing we have to a social net right now.

I run a small tech company though, not a sweat shop. Just recently, an opportunity to help open one did come up though!

A client is looking at setting up backoffice work in the countryside, so far it looks like we’ll be able to offer decent working conditions and wages. I’m slowly building the management software – fewer managers means we can pay workers better as well as be more profitable. If it works out, it would probably pay about double the regional minimum wage, which amounts to a decent job, certainly better than a lot of people have currently.

It’s not perfect, but it’s progress. There’s still a hundred ways it can go wrong and fail. So far we only have 10 staff, but it’s going steady.

For about 3 years though, I earned less running my company than the workers in the worst sweatshops. Even with all my video game experience! That was hard. Still, video games were my first experiences with management, accounting, economics and so on. It was better than nothing.

Anyway that’s a slice of life for you, fresh from Southeast Asia.