A sweatshop is a workplace where workers are employed at low wages and under unhealthy or oppressive conditions. The US Department of Labor defines a sweatshop as a factory that violates two or more labor laws. Sweatshops often involve poverty-level wages, excessive hours of labor, and unsafe or unhealthful workplace conditions. Certain social and economic conditions are necessary for sweatshops to be possible, including a mass of unskilled and unorganized laborers, management systems that neglect the human factor of labor, and lack of accountability for poor working conditions or failure of governments to intervene on behalf of workers. Historically, sweatshops have depended on homework and the development of contracting. In the homework system, members of a family receive payment for piecework done in their own home or in a residence that has been converted into a small factory. In contracting, individual workers or groups of workers agree to do a certain job for a certain price. The term "sweatshop" was first used in the late 19th century to describe aspects of the tailoring trade, but sweatshop conditions exist in other industries as well. While trade unions, minimum wage laws, fire safety codes, and labor laws have made sweatshops rarer in the developed world, they still exist and are increasingly associated with factories in the developing world.