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Why Nicholas Kristof is right to defend "sweatshops" in his recent New York Times op-ed
Who can be in favor of "sweatshops"? The word brings to mind images of hundreds of workers from a poor country hunched over sewing machines for fourteen hours a day in stifling heat and with no bathroom breaks. Any person who cares about human dignity must be opposed to sweatshops, right? Well, not so fast.
New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, well known for his dogged reporting on the genocide in Darfur, wrote a column on January 14 in which he defends sweatshops, saying that while the working conditions in many third-world factories are deplorable, the alternative is much worse.
What's the alternative? For many Cambodians living in Phnom Penh, it's rummaging through a garbage dump in what Kristof calls a "Dante-like version of hell." Some Cambodian families even live in shacks scattered among the garbage.
Writes Kristof: "[W]hile it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don't exploit enough. Talk to these families in the dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children." Moreover, Kristof writes, sweatshops are "only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty."
It's important to remember that large corporations bring manufacturing jobs to, say, Southeast Asia, not because they have any desire to lift the region out of poverty, but precisely because the labor standards in that part of the world are lax. Because the employees will work long hours for little pay, they get the jobs. If it were suddenly mandated that all workers should receive a "living wage" or get weekends and holidays off, the manufacturing jobs would disappear to other parts of the globe. Or they'd simply come back to the US.
Everyone believes people shouldn't have to make the decision to work in a sweatshop. They should have better alternatives. But right now they don't, and insisting that Cambodian factory workers are paid more will actually make their lives worse, because their jobs will disappear. As Will Wilkinson writes: "I am constantly dumbstruck that so many who profess to care about 'social justice' do little more than complain that desperate people have really terrible options and then work to take away the best options."
Over ten years ago, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman made a similar defense of sweatshops in Slate, writing: "The only reason developing countries have been able to compete with those industries is their ability to offer employers cheap labor. Deny them that ability, and you might well deny them the prospect of continuing industrial growth, even reverse the growth that has been achieved."
The living conditions for the average Indonesian or Bangladeshi or Vietnamese person, over the last 30 years, have improved, and as Krugman points out, this hasn't been because of foreign aid from benevolent governments, but rather because of "soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor." But whatever the motives that brought jobs to impoverished parts of the world, the result has been "to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful but nonetheless significantly better."
But over at her his Where am I Wearing blog, Kelsey Timmerman is not as sanguine as Kristof about sweatshops. Kelsey writes that his quest to see how and where his clothing was made-- which resulted in his visiting factories in places like Cambodia, China, and Honduras-- has led him to believe that the argument "sweatshops are good" over-simplifies just as much as the opposite argument. Though he agrees with Kristof's central premise, Kelsey sees the op-ed as "encouraging apathy" and writes, "As consumers, we should care who makes our clothes and what their lives are like." [Edit: Sorry, Kelsey!]
Read Kristof on sweatshops here. Here's Krugman. Here's Kelsey Timmerman's post at Where Am I Wearing? Here's Will Wilkinson's post, appropriately titled "Helping = More Options"
Filed under: Activism
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
paul Jan 19th 2009 2:52PM
Hey Aaron, what if I walked up to you and said, "I'm not going to set your hair on fire, but I am going to take a big swig of Coke and spit it in your face."
I imagine your response would be something along the lines of, "I don't want you to spit in my face," to which I would reply, "But think of the alternative, Aaron!" It's the same difference with sweatshops. Just because they're slightly better than terrible doesn't mean we should be championing and praising them as a good thing in the NY Times.
Bruno Jan 19th 2009 5:56PM
Paul - thanks for contributing your opinion. I'm sure you know better than Cambodians whats best for Cambodians. Can imagine them supporting these horrible corporations that allow them to feed and clothe their families? What gall. The should wait and patiently starve while we find a way to feed them that doesn't upset you so. I look forward to hearing your plan to raise the standard of living in that country.
Tyno Jan 19th 2009 6:31PM
I spent a few weeks in Cambodia in late 2007 and came to the same conclusion as Nicholas. Yes, by our standards, the labour conditions of the sweatshops are unconscionably bad. However, look at it from the point of view of the people actually working in those sweatshops and things start to look a little different. These jobs bring greatly needed money into the country and help the locals get back on their feet (and from what I've seen, it's a hell of a lot more effective than the corrupt beurocracies of NGOs.)
My personal opinion is that it is likely to be a transitory thing. As more people become more prosperous and living standards start to rise, there will be less and less of this kind of work being done. In the meantime, however, having actually spoken to some of the people in these job, I'd say they're a good thing...
Kelsey Jan 20th 2009 9:53AM
Aaron, thanks for mentioning me alongside Kristof and Krugman. One thing that needs to be mentioned is that Cambodia has one of the most well run and monitored garment industries in the world. The International Labor Organization has a very strong presence.
After walking into a garment factory in Cambodia, most people would not consider it a "sweatshop." That's why I hate the term. The factories I visited in Cambodia were not all that different from garment factories I visited in the US. For the most part workers seem to be treated with dignity, and cases of child labor are all but erased. Perhaps one of the industry's biggest problems in Cambodia is over unionization. There are about 300 factories and about 800 unions!
In fact, Cambodia markets itself to clothing brands as sweat-free.
I've visited actual sweatshops, dark, dangerous, hot, dehumanizing places. Most of the factories in Cambodia are not like this. For Kristof to call them sweatshops is a bit off in my book. But hey, I'm just some author who spent the better part of the past two year writing and researching a book on the subject, what do I know???
Even given the better working conditions in Cambodia, life for the workers is still tough. The average worker (late teen or early twenties women) supports six or seven people on their wage of $50 per month. Some of them have to pay bribes to get their job. I met 8 workers that shared a 8'X12' room. For of the girls slept on a wood bed (more of a table, really) and four of the girls slept on the concrete floor. The girls on the floor like it there because it's cooler.