I know you don’t, but some people do, and they make that argument. So I suspect that there is something wrong with the argument.
(People who must work or starve aren’t really volunteering to work. That’s a good place to start.)
Timex
4349
This isn’t really a logical position.
Simply because two people make a similar sounding argument about different things doesn’t make those argument equivalent. The veracity of the content matters.
Now, if you believe that so called sweatshops are equivalent to slavery, and thus never improve the position of those workers engaged in such activities, then Kristof is wrong. I suspect that’s not the case though.
But I can say with certainty that being enslaved never improves one’s lot in life. It’s not equivalent. My ancestors worked in sweatshops, but they were not enslaved.
Is there a functional difference between someone who is forced to work under threat of death, and someone who chooses to work because the alternative is death?
Compare being a factory worker in London’s dark satanic mills, vs being a slave laborer in the Belgian Congo or the American South. One is very bad, the other is much, much worse.
Timex
4352
Yes, very much so.
Being a slave is functionality different.
Come on, man. You know this. You don’t want to go down the road of arguing that slavery is the same as voluntarily working under poor conditions.
And, lest we forget the context of the conversation, we are talking about a situation where if you removed the option of these sweatshops, those people would not be better off. You would be making their lives worse. The alternative for them isn’t to live your life of privilege in the West.
We can seek to improve their lives, while still admitting that even those exploitive industrial settings are still an improvement to what they had before, even if it’s much worse than what we have.
I mean, I didn’t think we’d be going down the “pro-sweatshop” road either, but here we are.
No one going to the effort to tell us how much better sweatshops are than the alternative is advocating for improvement of anyone’s life.
It is possible to construct a cogent argument that while they may be better off with an individual factory being open, they are not better off, in general, with the economy and infrastructure of globalization that the factory is part of and that is necessary for the factory to exist.
For instance, in some cases, many poor people may have been farmers who grew and sold food for the surrounding markets, making a reasonable, but poor living. A clothing manufacturer comes into their area and purchases land or otherwise converts the local economy to cotton plantations, destroying employment for the farm workers and various tradesmen that supported them. This is the economic context in which the factory then enters the picture, which offers them economic opportunity better than their unemployment, but possibly not better than their employment would have been if they had a functioning local economy that wasn’t basically mercantilism 2.0. i.e. if the were able to retain ownership of and benefit from the exploitation of their resources, rather than having large foreign entities extract all the profit.
This is, admittedly, a contrived scenario (subsistence farming is incredibly taxing). But the broader point is that it may be disingenuous to talk about individual employment opportunities without talking about the broader context of the structure of the economy in which those jobs are being created.
Timex
4355
But that was the point. Despite being worse than what we have, those sweatshops are in some cases an improvement.
Or do you not think so? It’s perfectly valid if you think they aren’t. That’s something that could be perhaps argued with facts. But if we accept that they are in fact an improvement of some of those workers’ lives… Then they aren’t objectively bad.
Scuzz
4356
I don’t think anyone is pro sweatshop, except for the owner and whoever buys and sells their products. But a job is better than no job, and there are places where that is still true.
Maybe get the buyer of the end product to agree to pay more and you will benefit the worker.
Timex
4357
I think it’s important to understand that this isn’t really the case for the people we are talking about, I don’t think. They aren’t simply lower class people living as poor farmers like you might see in America.
These are subsistence farmers who deal with things like famine. Like, “watch your children die of starvation in front of you” level poverty.
In places like China and India, those economies have risen through largely exploitive labor practices (on some level, similar to how the west built its own industrial foundation). But the end result is that the median wealth of those populations has increased significantly.
I think arguing over whether sweatshops are better than an alternative is pointless. The reason those articles exist is to justify the existence of sweatshops by pointing to how much worse things could be, in the absence of any kind of desire for positive change. It’s like arguing over whether working a minimum wage job is better than starving to death, or whether being a slave is better than getting shot in the face. Sure, one is technically better, but that argument exists primarily to distract you from asking why we have to make those choices at all.
Scuzz
4359
In a perfect world everyone would get a living wage, we don’t live in a perfect world.
Timex
4360
But maybe such things are a natural transitional state. Do we expect that it’s possible for those populations to leap from subsistence farming to a modern economy with the same standard of living as more developed nations? I’m not sure that’s actually feasible.
On some level, the only advantage those populations have, when competing in the global stage, is their ability to work for lower compensation.
This is true, but then nobody really thinks the owners of the dark satanic mills were doing their workers a favor.
Slavery apologists — at least the American variety - explicitly make the argument that slavery was not so bad because slaves enjoyed better living conditions than their non-slave peers (in Africa). It’s impossible to hear that argument being made about sweatshops and not hear the similarities.
It isn’t as if the only alternatives here are these people have nothing and these people have sweatshops.
The choice, at least in China over the last 3 decades, was not death or sweatshop. It was grinding rural poverty for life, or work hard in a sweatshop (whose conditions tended to improve year by year) and save enough to fund your extended family getting better food, housing, education etc. It’s a hustle like working as a roughneck - brutal work but you are materially much better off than in the alternative, enough that you might be able to “retire” to much easier work in your 30s or 40s.
This may well be true, but I’d still give a lot of side eye to the guy who argued that the sweatshop operators were engaging in a humanitarian activity. Are there people out there cheering on Chinese sweatshop operators and calling for more of that?
The argument I’ve read is not cheering for the working conditions within sweatshops (which seems to be the focus of strawman criticism here), but rather an attempt to recognize they do in fact lift people out of poverty, and there are few if any other paths that appear to be sustainable.
It’s difficult (?) to name an economy that went from deep poverty to middle class without a stage of low-cost exporting (sweatshops), which funds infrastructure and provides the rural farming class a means to educate their children for better work in the next generation.
I understand the argument. I just find it execrable, and largely indistinguishable from the defense offered for plantation slavery. Operators of sweatshops don’t want to lift their workers or the society they live in out of poverty. Lifting their workers out of poverty deprives them of their opportunity to exploit those workers. What they want is perpetual misery they can profit from.
Right - your focus is on the manager of the sweatshop, rather than the multigenerational outcome of the families with and without access to those kinds of jobs.
Not saying you’re wrong in your particular criticism, but it isn’t clear if you’re merely venting or have a policy prescription/substitute that leads to better outcomes?
