Garment workers are often employed on piecework schemes -- so the worker must sew 800 seams per day (or more, depending) to hit their target pay. Much room for abuse there.
Industrial machines can do a lot of damage to the body, especially the hands. Most modern garment factories are located in places that don't have anything like Workers' Comp.
The ergonomics of sewing pretty much guarantee both repetitive stress and positional injuries. US garment workers often had neck and back problems.
The fabric creates significant dust, which causes white lung (like black lung for miners) which causes emphysema, asthma, and COPD eventually. Also, dusty environments are likely to burn easily because the dust can cause a fireball.
Historically, the textile workers of the Industrial Revolution (which is my field of historical research) were grateful for the job only in the sense that factory work was better than the alternative (starvation or the workhouse.) In the first half of the IR (to 1825), most textile workers had spent their childhood and early adulthood in some sort of service or agricultural work with textile work as a seasonal or supplemental source of income. Stockingers (stocking makers) are a good example -- they were independent, having contracted to produce $N stockings each week. The jobbers provided the thread and sometimes the frames (some stockings were knitted on a machine), either on a lend basis or occasionally on a rent to own basis. The stockingers set their own hours and it was primarily a cottage industry. It was sort of like our present "envelope stuffing" work at home schemes, except it actually worked.
However, with the rise of steam powered machinery, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, enclosure that forced people off the land and the rising price of grain due to the Corn Laws, the formerly cottage industry of textile production concentrated in factories and labor was desperate (Agriculture being in the shift from communal subsistence to cash crop), displaced (most factory workers started life in a rural region and were forced off the land) and plentiful (there was a major baby boom beginning in 1775 that lasted and echoed through the end of the Victorian era). All of which depressed wages. Also recall that in this era, unions were not only discouraged, but illegal, and union organizing was a hanging offense. Participating in industrial action could get one transported.
By the later IR, most factory workers were trapped in the poverty cycle, having spent their childhoods on the factory floors as water boys or spindle girls or button sewers or makers, and so knew nothing else.
This is primarily from the English perspective, but since most of Europe was in massive war or reconstruction from 1780 to 1850, and since the US textile industry was essentially the same (except for the enclosure and the possibility of transportation) it's the research standard. The major difference between Manchester in 1830 and Bangledesh in 2013 is the climate and mechanization. Otherwise, the economic factors are remarkably parallel.
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