A sweatshop is a workplace characterized by substandard wages, few or no benefits, hazardous working conditions, hostile or arbitrary discipline, long hours and little if any government protection.
Sweatshops are associated with developing nations but they also exist in modern societies. Sweatshop workers are often trapped in a cycle of poverty and exploitation, since they cannot improve their lives without significant savings, and most do not have education or other resources for social mobility.
Sweatshop workers include men, women and often children with little education, and some of them actually work in conditions of modern slavery. Sweatshop labor sometimes comes from human trafficking or deception. Workers are lured to sweatshops under the pretense of higher pay and a better life, and they are kept at work by force, debt or other pressure. These are more likely in cases where the workforce is drawn from children or the uneducated rural poor.