Anecdotes from 70's South Korea: Sweatshops can have atrocious working condition (poor lighting that hurts your eyes, poor chairs, ceiling so low that you can't

Anecdotes from 70's South Korea: Sweatshops can have atrocious working condition (poor lighting that hurts your eyes, poor chairs, ceiling so low that you can't even stand up, working 10+ hours a day). Many workers died young from various health problems they developed. Regarding "starve to death" part, the government also suppressed crop prices so that these aforementioned workers could make their living with horribly low wages. Of course, this in turn meant that farming villages couldn't support as many people as they could if the price was determined by free market, ensuring a stream of people eager to work in factories. So it's not exactly "sweatshops keep people from starving to death." Sometimes, those who enable sweatshops also make sure (whether intentionally or through apathy) that people would otherwise live one step from starvation. On the other hand, decades of misery transformed South Korea into one of the world's leading industrial nations, so... I guess it's complicated.