Two reporters relay this anecdote from Thailand:
One of the half-dozen men and women sitting on a bench eating was a sinewy, bare-chested laborer in his late 30’s named Mongkol Latlakorn. It was a hot, lazy day, and so we started chatting idly about the food and, eventually, our families. Mongkol mentioned that his daughter, Darin, was 15, and his voice softened as he spoke of her. She was beautiful and smart, and her father’s hopes rested on her.
“Is she in school?” we asked.
“Oh, no,” Mongkol said, his eyes sparkling with amusement. “She’s working in a factory in Bangkok. She’s making clothing for export to America.” He explained that she was paid $2 a day for a nine-hour shift, six days a week.
“It’s dangerous work,” Mongkol added. “Twice the needles went right through her hands. But the managers bandaged up her hands, and both times she got better again and went back to work.”
“How terrible,” we murmured sympathetically.
So begins Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s article on sweatshops for the New York Times a few years ago. The two had lived off and on in Asia for 14 years, and were researching their upcoming book on emerging Asian economies, Thunder From the East. Like most westerners, Kristof and WuDunn arrived in Asia horrified by the sweatshop conditions they’d heard about and witnessed. Like most westerners – accustomed to 40-max hour workweeks, sick leave, and vacation – the two were outraged at the way western companies exploited third world labor. But read on:
Mongkol looked up, puzzled. “It’s good pay,” he said. “I hope she can keep that job. There’s all this talk about factories closing now, and she said there are rumors that her factory might close. I hope that doesn’t happen. I don’t know what she would do then.”
Mongkol’s story illustrates how, by the time they wrote their book, Kristof and WuDunn had significantly upgraded their opinion of sweatshops. While regrettable, they concluded, sweatshops are a crucial and necessary step in most economies’ evolution to prosperity.
Bans and Boycotts
Kristoff and WuDunn are right, of course. And efforts to ban, boycott, or otherwise shut down third world factories bring nothing but harm to the people they employ. Removing the best of a handful of bad options doesn’t benefit the poor at all. It hurts them. And sometimes it kills them. Examples abound:
- In the early 1990s, the United States Congress considered the “Child Labor Deterrence Act,” which would have taken punitive action against companies benefiting from child labor. The Act never passed, but the public debate it triggered put enormous pressure on a number of multinational corporations with assets in the U.S. One German garment maker laid off 50,000 child workers in Bangladesh. The British charity organization Oxfam later conducted a study that found that thousands of those laid-off children later became prostitutes, turned to crime, or starved to death.
- The United Nations organization UNICEF reports that an international boycott of the Nepalese carpet industry in the mid-1990s caused several plants to shut down; thousands of Nepalese girls later entered the sex trade.
- In 1995, a consortium of anti-sweatshop groups threw the spotlight on football (soccer) stitching plants in Pakistan. In response, Nike and Reebok shut down their plants in Pakistan, and several other companies followed suit. The result: tens of thousands of unemployed Pakistanis. Mean income in Pakistan fell by 20%. According to University of Colorado economist Keith E. Maskus, studies later showed a large proportion of those laid off ended up in crime, begging, or working as prostitutes. (Masksus source: The Race to the Top: The Real Story of Globalization, by Tomas Larsson.)
- In 2000 the BBC did an expose on sweatshop factories in Cambodia with ties to both Nike and the Gap. The BBC uncovered unsavory working conditions, and found several examples of children under 15 years of age working 12 or more hour shifts. After the BBC expose aired, both Nike and the Gap pulled out of Cambodia under public pressure. Cambodia lost $10 million in contracts, and hundreds of Cambodians lost their jobs.
How Free Trade Beats Sweatshops
In truth, every prosperous country on the planet today went through an industrial period heavily reliant on sweatshop labor. The United States, Britain, France, Sweden and others all rode to modernity on the backs of child laborers. The choice was simple: kids worked, or they went hungry. It wasn’t a terribly rosy set of choices, but at least the choice was available. Anti-globalization activists are doing their damndest to make sure choice isn’t available to those living in today’s fledgling economies.
Critics counter that unlike in the early 20th century, western companies today are wealthy enough to pay “living” wages, to establish comfortable working conditions, and to protect third world environments. They may be right.
But then, what advantage would there be to investing in the developing world in the first place? Cheap labor is the only chit the third world has to lure much-needed western investment. Take it away, and there’s no reason for western corporations to incur the costs of putting up factories, shipping, security and the bevy of other expenses that come with maintaining plants overseas.
One of free trade’s chief critics admits as much. In the introduction his book The Race to the Bottom, anti-globalization icon Alan Tonelson writes the following, in reference to the World Trade Organization:
Most of the organization’s third world members-or at least their governments-opposed including any labor rights and environmental protections in trade agreements. They viewed low wages and lax pollution control laws as major assets they could offer to international investors-prime lures for job-creating factories and the capital they so desperately needed for other development-related purposes. Indeed, they observed, most rich countries ignored the environment and limited workers’ power (to put it kindly) early in their economic histories. Why should today’s developing countries be held to higher standards?
Tonelson, of course, was on his way to making another point. But he inadvertently revealed an inconsistency that will always plague the legitimacy of anti-globalist logic: boycotts, “fair trade” regulations and public pressure do nothing to punish the corporations who benefit from sweatshops. They punish only third world laborers and, to a lesser extent, western consumers.
The best way to lessen the plight of sweatshop workers is more free trade, not less. If workers make 75 cents per day in factory A – the only plant in town – the best thing that could happen to them would be for a second factory to open up. If Factory B pays less than 75 cents, it won’t attract any workers. If it offers exactly 75 cents, it might attract a few workers who couldn’t get jobs at factory A. If it pays more than 75 cents, however, it might attract the best and brightest from factory A. Factory A then must decide whether to up its wages, or look for new labor – which means more jobs.
The alternative: force factory A to pay artificially high wages. That negates the advantage factory A had by investing in a developing country in the first place. Factory A packs up and returns to the U.S. Factory B never happens, because factory B’s parent company sees no advantage (see: cheap labor) in investing in the developing country. Factory A’s workers’ wages go from 75 cents per day to nothing.
Instead of two factories paying twice as many workers higher wages, enabling them to inch their way out of poverty, a community is left with no factories, no jobs, and no hope.
Sweatshop Success: Some Examples
Recent history teems with examples of how sweatshop labor has helped poor economies leap to prosperity. And given the interconnectivity and technology available in the current world economy – and that there’s lots of western wealth to help them along – they can make the leap in a fraction of the time it took the west.
Kristoff and WuDunn note, for example, that it took Britain 58 years to double per capita GDP after its industrial revolution. China – home to millions of sweatshop workers – doubles its per capita GDP every ten years. In the sweatshop-dotted southern providence of Dongguan, wages have increased fivefold in just the last few years. “A private housing market has appeared,” Kristof and WuDunn write, “and video arcades and computer schools have opened to cater to workers with rising incomes
