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The textile and garment industry has been rife with exploitation for centuries. However the industrial revolution allowed for production at a whole new scale, and with this came exploitation at a new scale.
Industrialisation of textile production occurred through the 18th - 19th centuries, with mechanised spinning and fabric production, and garment production was the last to be mechanised.
The image and quote below describe the first 'sweatshops' where workers 'sweated' to make a living while sewing garments by hand from industrially-woven cloth.
“Here, in a small back room, about eight feet square, we found no fewer than seven workmen, with their coats and shoes off, seated cross-legged on the floor, busy stitching the different parts of different garments. The floor was strewn with sleeve-boards, irons, and snips of various coloured cloths. ... They made dress and frock coats, they told me…and indeed, every other kind of woollen garment. They worked for the ready-made houses, or "slopsellers."
- Victorian reformer Henry Mayhew, From The Morning Chronicle : Labour and Poor, 1849-50; Henry Mayhew - Letter VI
Around 1850 the first commercial sewing machines were developed, and the garment industry was industrialised at scale.
As large scale manufacture developed, subcontracting allowed women workers to make clothes in small workshops at homes.
Subcontractors had to bid for work and competition drove prices down meaning that workers could never make a living wage, no matter how hard they 'sweated.'
Below is a quote from one of the Victorian reformers, Charles Kingsley, decrying the treatment of workers. He also makes the link between cheap clothes and exploitation - a situation not so different to today's.
You can read Kingsley's impassioned plea for workers below, and the full text here.
Woman sews on a Singer sewing machine (source)
“But it is so hard to deprive the public of the luxury of cheap clothes! Then let the public look out for some other means of procuring that priceless blessing. If that, on experiment, be found impossible - if the comfort of the few be for ever to be bought by the misery of the many - if civilization is to benefit every one except the producing class - then this world is truly the devil's world, and the sooner so ill-constructed and infernal a machine is destroyed by that personage, the better.”
-Victorial reformer, Charles Kingsley, Cheap Clothes and Nasty, 1850
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