The image at the top of this article is a Nike product, the “swoosh” clearly visible. I’m sure most of our readers would remember the savaging dealt to Nike in the 90s in the media, in the classroom, in the university cafeteria, and anywhere where people regarded themselves as socially aware. These days, the popular target is Apple, partly as a result of the well-publicised suicides at the Hon Hai factories in China which churn out Apple’s bestselling and stylish industrial designs. Regardless, “sweatshops” have been getting a bad name for a very long time: the name was coined in the 19th century, and then as now the clothing industry has been a major culprit in their use.
We’ll define a sweatshop for this article as a workplace where people work under terrible conditions for wages below a “living wage” to produce goods for Western corporations, conditions and wages well below the minimum requirements of the countries where those corporations are based, and indeed well below the minimum required to be able to afford to buy one of the products the worker is making (even if it is just a $50 Sean John sweater, no pun intended). I must admit that I’ve always thought of sweatshops as an evil. An evil inevitably caused by the willingness of third world nations do anything for jobs and investment of foreign capital, to be gradually remedied as standards of living rose in those countries and the workers are able to force better wages and conditions as has happened in the West over the past couple of centuries of industrial development, but an evil nonetheless. And even companies like Apple and Nike play into that, with public statements pledging to have their manufacturers improve conditions and claiming there’s no intention to use sweatshops. All indications are that Sweatshops Are Bad.
I then read an article by Matt Zwolinski that challenged this and made me think a little further, in spite of the source being a libertarian (my views on libertarianism need not be repeated). I should also give a hat-tip to The Dish for reminding me of this.
Zwolinski’s counterargument does not say that sweatshops are something to aspire to (there are people who argue this, suggesting that anything above subsistence wages for basic labour is either not in line with “from each according to his ability, to each according to this needs” if you’re a socialist or is interference in the free market if you’re a capitalist). What it says boils down to this: a sweatshop job is better than no job at all, and people wouldn’t take them in droves if that wasn’t true (or at least, if they didn’t believe it was true). While the consistently positive interviews and surveys of current sweatshop workers (for example, those of the Hon Hai workers in China) have the obvious flaw that few will dump on their job if they want to keep it, at least the positive reports from those workers show they do want to keep the job. Which must be worth something. And there is a reasonable case to be made that a handful of suicides at an operation as large as Hon Hai is no worse (and possibly better) than the suicide rate amongst Chinese workers generally, just with a higher profile.
Sure, the sweatshop is not in the business of giving its workers puppies and rainbows. It would be nice if it gave better conditions, but at least it gives something. We don’t make the world, we only try to live in it, and if sweatshop wages and conditions are needed to establish a third world business, at least every new business is that much more competition for workers and another step closer to all sweatshops needing to improve conditions to keep the fittest and most productive workers.
Another analogy: is the person who gives $2 to charity is bad because they didn’t give $10, or good (or at least not bad) because at least they gave something? And is a donation to charity somehow worth less to the poor because the donor gets a benefit from wealthy Western consumers than if the donor got nothing?
Or to sum up even more pithily, instead of saying sweatshops are bad, shouldn’t we just be saying “sweatshops aren’t great, but they’re better than nothing”?
While I don’t buy this completely, it has a certain logic to it that can’t be dismissed flippantly lest you say something like “I’d be willing to pay an extra $10 bucks on an iPhone if it went to the poor” and someone points out that hey, no-one’s stopping you from donating that $10 if you feel that way, so by your own standards you’re the bad one if you take advantage of the price and then don’t donate that money (to paraphrase Jeff Miller’s analogy). I’m interested in your thoughts. Hit me with your best shot in the comments.
PS: Zwolinski is quick to point out (as I am, for the purposes of this discussion) that it’s only the existence of the sweatshop we’re talking about. If the sweatshop owner, in collusion with local authorities, takes away other employment options or people’s ability to bargain for better conditions (for example, press-ganging workers, seizing the land used by a farming community or preventing the workers from unionizing) then that is unequivocally bad and no-one’s arguing about except Robert Mugabe and Rush Limbaugh. I recognize this is an easy topic to sidetrack, but let’s stay focussed.
(Image source: sneakerphotography on flickr)
