A sweatshop is a working environment with conditions that are considered by many people of industrialised nations to be difficult or dangerous, usually where the workers have few opportunities to address their situation. This can include exposure to harmful materials, hazardous situations, extreme temperatures, or abuse from employers. Sweatshop workers often work long hours for little pay, regardless of any laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage. Child labour laws may also be violated.

Although often associated with poor developing countries, sweatshops may exist in any country. Sweatshops have existed in several different countries and cultures, including in the United States and Europe. Sweatshops usually employ low levels of technology, but may produce many different goods, for example, toys, shoes, clothing, and furniture.

Meanwhile, defenders of sweatshops, such as Paul Krugman and Johan Norberg, claim that people choose to work in sweatshops because the sweatshops offer them substantially higher wages and better working conditions compared to their previous jobs of manual farm labor, and that sweatshops are an early step in the process of technological and economic development whereby a poor country turns itself into a rich country. In addition, sometimes when anti-sweatshop activists were successful in getting sweatshops to close, some of the employees who had been working in the sweatshops ended up starving to death, while others ended up turning to prostitution.