Pro-Sweatshops

The Pro-Sweatshop Movement

Anti-sweatshop protests can be seen on TV, heard on the radio, and witnessed across college campuses nationwide. Many anti-sweatshop protesters boycott products produced in sweatshops, thinking that they are harming the multinational corporations or the manufacturing firms themselves. In fact, they are really harming the actual workers that they are trying to help.

Sweatshops may not be ethical, but they are a necessary evil for developing countries. Way back when the US was still in its early stages of industrialization, many workers, foreign and native, took to deplorable factories to make a living for themselves. There are factories, manufacturing plants, and distribution centers even now here in the US that can be compared to sweatshops elsewhere. I actually worked for one over the summer to try to make some money for the fall semester. It was tough, it was grueling, and it was, to me, like a sweatshop! But I worked there instead of at the local JCPenney or Wegmans because they paid more. And that is my point. Sweatshops sometimes offer a more lucrative alternative. No matter where you live, whether in the US, Mexico, or Honduras, there will be sweatshop-like establishments. The one that I worked for paid significantly more than a sweatshop in Honduras would but that's because the standards of living here are higher and everything here costs more than it does in Honduras. No one, however, seems to pay any attention to the "sweatshops" here in America.

I visited my home country at the end of summer in 2005 and I was living in the lap of luxury there. One US dollar was worth five hryvnia, or five Ukrainian dollars, there. And everything was cheap, for an American anyway. A cut and highlights for my hair that I would pay about $100 US dollars for here cost me just $15 US dollars there. A taxi ride across the city cost me only $1 to $2 dollars. So in US standards, Ukraine seems like a poor country but the people there still manage to get by on the "low" wages that they earn. And just like in Honduras, I can only assume that there are so called "sweatshops" in Ukraine, too, but I can also assume that they provide more jobs and income than not.

Krugman's argument that "bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all (1997) has some truth to it. If it weren't for sweatshops workers in third world nations would be working in even less desirable conditions. I understand Krugman's exasperation when he asks "Why, then, the outrage of my correspondents? Why does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for 60 cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of 30 cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land--or of a Filipino scavenging on a garbage heap?" (1997). People shouldn't be protesting against sweatshops; they should be protesting against foreign governments that are corrupt and which do nothing about the high poverty levels that actually make sweatshops seem very welcoming and attractive to the citizens in their countries.

People who are against the sweatshop movement give reference to surveys that indicate that consumers in industrialized economies are willing to pay higher prices for products produced under better working conditions (2000). I don't think that's entirely correct for a vast majority of the population. I don't think that the astronomical amount of people that shop at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Payless Shoe Source,