EduClaytion

Are Sweatshops A Necessary Evil?

[This post is part of the SUMMER JUSTICE SERIES. You can start with Part 1 here.]

Part 4: Sweatshop-Free Goods

What do you think of when you hear the word sweatshop?  What images enter your mind?  Maybe you’re picturing a dark room somewhere on the other side of the world.  What type of people are there?  What are these individuals doing?  Have you formed some kind of scene in your mind?

The ideas that inform our perspective come from many different places.  Depending on your personal view you could have envisioned women in Asia, children in Africa, illegal immigrants in the United States, or even poor white folks somewhere in Alabama.  Regardless of your view, most people immediately think of negative, perhaps evil, things.  Sweatshops are violative places where laws, rights, and sometimes even workers are abused.  You don’t need me to tell you what’s wrong with such pratices. 

Like the previous issues in this Summer Justice series, most of us would never support systems that promote injustice if we knew what they were and how to disconnect.  The problem is that the line we seek is often blurry and gray.  That’s why we’re examining the most common ways people around the world are exploited.  The existence of sweatshops gets people passionate in a hurry, but the debate includes prominent voices from all sides.

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Sweatshops are most easily defined as places that produce goods while violating labor laws.  They are most common in developing countries but still exist in the most powerful nations on the earth.  These facilities exist in the largest cities of the world, and that includes New York and Los Angeles.  Common violations include child labor, low pay, long hours, and poor working conditions. 

One common misconception is that sweatshops have only existed in recent years.  They’ve acutally been around since the Industrial Revolution early in the 19th century.  Governments have been instituting labor laws since the 1820s and 30s.  Some groups (abolitionists) of those times fought to eliminate slavery.  Once they accomplished that objective they turned their attention to abusive labor practices.  America finally changed laws to end some of the worst of these practices in the early 20th century.

In the past century companies have continued to receive goods, finished and raw, from facilities where the overhead is low enough to increase profits.  Everybody talks about “made in China” but you’ll find goods made in Honduras, Bangladesh, Jordan, Taiwan, and beyond.  I just saw hacky sacks at the mall made in Guatemala.  In America we swim through millions of products made cheaply in a variety of ways in countries all over the world. 

The system is not going to change.  Globalization is not going to end.  So what are we to do?  Some people tell us to stop buying clothing and goods made in sweatshops, but that’s easier said than done when you consider the confusion over the origins of our products and the amount of cheap labor involved in our national marketplace.  We’ve already established that we consume too much, but that doesn’t mean we will never consume.

The average person can’t always afford to buy from companies offering a sweatshop-free guarantee.  In some ways, you’ll do just as much good buying your goods second-hand.  March with me fellow thrift-shoppers and we’ll change the world! 

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Many people believe sweatshops are a necessary evil.  These arguments start with needy nations and end with the people working in these facilities.  I’ll leave it to the economists to explain their scientific reasons why the sweatshop model is either necessary, useful, or simply unavoidable.  I would only offer two final thoughts on the subject.

The first thing to note is that as bad as they may seem to us, sweatshops sometimes offer still better conditions than what those laborers had experienced in the past.  Consider this statement about the Asian situation from a 2004 article in Reason Magazine called Sweatless Shopping:

“…[I]n the absence of existing infrastructure, low wages are the primary means of luring multinationals who still pay better than the average domestic producer.”

I don’t celebrate that thought, only acknowledge that resolving these tough issues is often messy and complicated.  Carol Bellamy pointed this out well in a 1997 work on the world’s children.  In a section called “An Agreement In Bangladesh,” she described the damage sometimes done as solutions are presented to children involved in illicit labor practices.

After U.S. Senator Tom Harkin’s child labor legislation was introduced in the early 1990s, some 50,000 children were released from their work.  Sounds good right?  The problem is that without that work the likelihood of starvation looms.  Many of these kids often resorted to worse lifestyles than sweatshop labor, even turning to prostitution for food.  Bellamy said child workers need “… a meaningful alternative if they are not to suffer from some of the very measures designed to help them.”

We’re left once again with more questions.  As with any other issue involving possible abuses against others in the production of our commodities, you will have to do your research if you really want to be sure the money you spend is not going to organizations guilty of exploiting the poor and helpless.  Unfortunately, some of these painful realities have become so engrained in our world that workable solutions struggle to gain traction on an international level. 

Next Week PART 5: Lasting Footprints

[Note: In the Relevant article I'm working from, Julie Clawson offers a couple other suggestions that I'm not going to deal with.  The first is to eat sustainably.  I've covered some of these ideas in the past in a piece about Food Inc.  The second topic I'm not touching is to conserve energy.  I'm certainly no scientist and don't trust all the spouting from every direction by ideologues.  On such issues, I'll stick to the basic philosophy that we should be good stewards of the earth but if the government tells us we must jump through some hoop like buying certain light bulbs then look out.  Most likely some politicians are just trying to get more control over us for a project that will cost billions of dollars only to be completely ineffective or worse.] 

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July 19, 2010 - Posted by educlaytion | Life, Politics