Realistic article about sweatshops (1 Viewer)

[Maurile Tremblay]

Chinese factory workers cash in sweat for prosperity

By Richard Read, The Oregonian

March 06, 2010

WUHU, China -- Years after activists accused Nike and other Western brands of running Third World sweatshops, the issue has taken a surprising turn.

The path of discovery winds from coastal factory floors far into China's interior, past women knee-deep in streams pounding laundry. It continues down a dusty village lane to a startling sight: arrays of gleaming three-story houses with balconies, balustrades and even Greek columns rising from rice paddies.

It turns out that factory workers -- not the activists labeled "preachy" by one expert, and not the Nike executives so wounded by criticism -- get the last laugh. Villagers who "went out," as Chinese say, for what critics described as dead-end manufacturing jobs are sending money back and returning with savings, building houses and starting businesses.

Workers who stitched shoes for Nike Inc. and apparel for Columbia Sportswear Co., both based near Beaverton, are fueling a wave of prosperity in rural China. The boom has a solid feel, with villagers paying cash for houses.

"No one would take out a mortgage to build a house," said Wang Jianguo, 37, who returned after a factory injury in a distant province to the area near Wuhu, west of Shanghai. "You wouldn't feel secure living in a house you didn't own."

In the end, market forces and ambition, not activism or corporate initiatives, pushed up wages and improved working conditions. The forces originally unleashed by the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping still drive China's economy, producing a manufacturing labor shortage and giving villagers viable choices beyond factory work.

China's rural boom

Improved living standards don't negate criticism by activists who castigated the outsourcing industry, especially Nike, a 1990s lightning rod for allegations of low pay and onerous working conditions. Abuses continue in some plants, especially those unconnected to international brands.

But longtime activists acknowledge that the sweatshop issue has lost steam, at least concerning China. Conditions and wages have improved, says Jeffrey Ballinger, a critic who still dismisses corporate-responsibility programs -- in which Nike, Columbia and other companies set standards and inspect factories -- as spin.

"My complaint always was they should have been able to make that kind of wage without working 70 hours a week," said Ballinger, a McMaster University doctoral candidate in political science. He wants the Obama administration to push countries to require higher "living wage" levels.

Medea Benjamin used to accuse Nike of exploiting factory employees. She says pay and conditions have improved because of worker demands, international pressure and compliance programs introduced by the shoe giant, Columbia and other brands. The days of indentured servitude are gone, says Benjamin, founding director of Global Exchange, a San Francisco human rights organization.

"Workers have options," Benjamin said. But she would prefer to see U.S. workers making Nikes for the American market.

$220 a month

Nike drew flak as it moved contract manufacturing from South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s to China, Indonesia and ever cheaper labor markets. Its expansion in China came during the 1990s as Deng, the legendary reformer, opened the communist nation's economy.

That opening led to the largest migration in human history. Tens of millions of villagers left home for coastal areas to earn a pittance by Western standards.

Today China has about 130 million migrant workers. Migrants can expect grueling work at minimum wage. They become anything from garbage collectors to waiters to prostitutes to nannies to the assembly-line workers who power China's export machine.

The average employee at Ever Rich Knitting Garment Co.'s plant near Guangzhou, China, makes $220 a month, which can double during busy seasons.

The pay is minuscule by Western measures. But Mon Xijian, a 31-year-old who has worked at Ever Rich since 1996, has saved enough with his wife, who also works there, to buy a six-unit apartment building back home.

The couple don't recommend the lifestyle. They see their two children -- who live at home with Mon's in-laws 1,200 miles away -- every year or two. Yet Mon far prefers factory work to farming. He's saving to send his son and daughter to college so they can escape both.

"I want them to get as much higher education as possible," said Mon, who irons Columbia garments.

Chu Zhiling, a young woman at Beijing Topnew garment factory, sends 80 percent of her income home to Inner Mongolia -- a region with 19 percent economic growth last year, the highest in China.

"I'd like to open a shop, like my friend who has a boutique selling coats," Chu said. "Now that I've seen the world, I have so many more choices than my parents had."

U.S. journalist Leslie Chang followed young Chinese assembly-line workers for her recently published book, "Factory Girls." Chang says money sent home, and migrants moving back, are changing rural China.

Line workers, she says, can earn several times the average $200 annual income of a farm family.

"They're sleeping 12 in a dorm, and it looks like a pretty crappy life," Chang said. "But you don't hear workers say, 'Oh, I have no hope, I'm a slave.' They say, 'I want to save some money. My dream is to be Bill Gates or to own a restaurant.'"

Chang views sweatshop critics as condescending. She notes that the 19th-century U.S. industrial economy developed in a similar way, as Vermont and New Hampshire farm girls migrated to work in Massachusetts textile plants, sending savings home. She says savvy Chinese workers, not preachy activists, are securing better conditions and wages in China's fast-developing economy.

Yet critics did push Nike and other companies to develop factory standards and inspections.

Nike executives declined to comment on the sweatshop issue's new turn. Hannah Jones, Nike vice president of sustainable business and innovation, said through a spokeswoman that factory jobs are steppingstones for many young women in emerging economies.

"They learn financial and job skills that can take them on to other jobs or back to their home communities," spokeswoman Kate Meyers said.

Laborers start fish resort

That formula is working -- after two decades -- for Chen Laixiang, a 40-year-old villager from Anhui province, long one of China's poorest inland areas. Chen's face is weathered and his hands callused from working outside for 20 years, pouring concrete in cities ranging from Nanjing to Beijing.

Now Chen and his brother, a woodworker, are back -- starting a business in Zhi Chang, their native village. They won permission to lease land and enlarge a pond.

The brothers are stocking the pond with fish. As 50-50 partners, they took a small-business class and invested $22,000 to build a fishing resort.

"I don't want to live in other cities anymore," Chen said. "I want to promote the local economy."

Nearby in the town of Nan Hu, returnee Zhang Litian operates a one-van taxi service. He used to drive a forklift at a chemical factory in Anhui's capital city, saving almost $1,500 a year.

"Staying home is better," said Zhang, 42, a father of two. "Now I can earn much more money than working outside."

The global economic crisis forced many migrants -- perhaps 10 million to 20 million -- home to the countryside. Factories that exported to the United States and other consumer nations laid off workers in droves.

Chinese leaders fretted about the potential for protests by unemployed migrants. But many of the jobless found or created opportunities back in their villages or in nearby towns.

Beijing mounted a stimulus program that included economic development in the hinterland. The rural surge boosts the economy just as other nations look to China to lead the world out of recession.

China's economy barrels ahead, with 8.7 percent growth last year and double-digit expansion expected this year. In a surprising reversal, economic growth of several inland provinces such as Anhui surpasses growth in recession-battered coastal regions, which long led China's development.

Anhui has attracted factories. Workers in the plants have dreams. Like almost all the young women in her village, Zhang Yuan went out to work in a garment factory.

"Living in the countryside, you feel like a bird in a cage, not knowing the world outside," said Zhang, a petite 19-year-old who sews garments in Shanghai Silk Group's plant in Xuan Cheng, Anhui.

Zhang lives in a factory dorm during the week. She spends weekends at home, 40 minutes away by bus. Her parents, a driver and a housewife, have used money she earned during the last year to buy a fridge, a color television and a motorbike.

"If we go outside, we may encounter a lot of difficulties," said Zhang, who aims to open a clothing shop someday. "But even if we try and fail, we will never feel regret."

 

[Saints-Man]

Here's my theory about why liberals are often the ones boycotting goods produced by sweatshops.

Normally, liberals try to be the champions of the poor.

In the U.S., the major party that most liberals identify with is the Democrats. That's because Democrats, more than Republicans, tend to champion liberal ideals. And I think there's a tendency for political homerism -- liberals are more apt to accept Democratic positions just because they come from Democrats (while conservatives are more apt to accept Republican positions just because they come from Republicans.)

But the Democrats don't always champion liberal ideals. Sometimes -- like Republicans -- they just cater to special interests. That's not a criticism of Democrats; it's just the reality of how our political system works. If you want to have a chance to get elected, you need campaign contributions, and to get campaign contributions, you have to cater to special interests. It's the American way.

Republicans and Democrats do not sell their special interest politicking as special interest politicking -- they sell it as what's good for the country as a whole. We need the farm bill not because Archer Daniels Midland gives politicians lots of money, but because we need to stabilize corn prices for the good of the country. We need to bail out Wall Street firms not because those companies give politicians lots of money, but to prevent the financial collapse of the entire nation. And so on.

Liberals and conservatives alike can get suckered by that kind of rhetoric when it comes from the Democrats or Republicans, respectively, since they are a sympathetic source.

I think that's what has happened, generally, on the issue of sweatshops.

American labor unions are strongly opposed to imported goods made in sweatshops. They're cheaper competition, and eliminating the competition benefits unions. Labor unions also tend to give a lot of money to the Democratic party, and thus Democratic politicians often take up positions favored by labor unions -- selling it not as what's best for labor unions, but as what's best for the world. A lot of liberals are sympathetic to such messages when they come from Democratic politicians. Democratic politicians smear sweatshops on behalf of labor unions, and a lot of liberals therefore oppose imported goods made in sweatshops. Because, without giving any credence to empirical evidence (or widely accepted economic theory), boycotting sweatshops is good for the world.

A true liberal, though -- in my estimation -- should look past special-interest-driven political rhetoric and look at what's really good for the world. And that involves studying the world -- the real world -- and taking stock of what consequences different policies have had on actual people who are actually affected by them.

When it comes to sweatshops, I don't think the evidence is ambiguous. I think it's pretty clear that boycotting sweatshops has sharply negative effects -- including starvation and sometimes death -- on the poorest people in the world. That's something true liberals should oppose even if labor unions don't like it.

I missed this before. This is an excellent, fair post.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

This thread needs some Paul Krugman.

In Praise of Cheap Labor

Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all.

By Paul Krugman

Friday, March 21, 1997

For many years a huge Manila garbage dump known as Smokey Mountain was a favorite media symbol of Third World poverty. Several thousand men, women, and children lived on that dump--enduring the stench, the flies, and the toxic waste in order to make a living combing the garbage for scrap metal and other recyclables. And they lived there voluntarily, because the $10 or so a squatter family could clear in a day was better than the alternatives.

The squatters are gone now, forcibly removed by Philippine police last year as a cosmetic move in advance of a Pacific Rim summit. But I found myself thinking about Smokey Mountain recently, after reading my latest batch of hate mail.

The occasion was an op-ed piece I had written for the New York Times, in which I had pointed out that while wages and working conditions in the new export industries of the Third World are appalling, they are a big improvement over the "previous, less visible rural poverty." I guess I should have expected that this comment would generate letters along the lines of, "Well, if you lose your comfortable position as an American professor you can always find another job--as long as you are 12 years old and willing to work for 40 cents an hour."

Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization--of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad.

But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

After all, global poverty is not something recently invented for the benefit of multinational corporations. Let's turn the clock back to the Third World as it was only two decades ago (and still is, in many countries). In those days, although the rapid economic growth of a handful of small Asian nations had started to attract attention, developing countries like Indonesia or Bangladesh were still mainly what they had always been: exporters of raw materials, importers of manufactures. Inefficient manufacturing sectors served their domestic markets, sheltered behind import quotas, but generated few jobs. Meanwhile, population pressure pushed desperate peasants into cultivating ever more marginal land or seeking a livelihood in any way possible--such as homesteading on a mountain of garbage.

Given this lack of other opportunities, you could hire workers in Jakarta or Manila for a pittance. But in the mid-'70s, cheap labor was not enough to allow a developing country to compete in world markets for manufactured goods. The entrenched advantages of advanced nations--their infrastructure and technical know-how, the vastly larger size of their markets and their proximity to suppliers of key components, their political stability and the subtle-but-crucial social adaptations that are necessary to operate an efficient economy--seemed to outweigh even a tenfold or twentyfold disparity in wage rates.

And then something changed. Some combination of factors that we still don't fully understand--lower tariff barriers, improved telecommunications, cheaper air transport--reduced the disadvantages of producing in developing countries. (Other things being the same, it is still better to produce in the First World--stories of companies that moved production to Mexico or East Asia, then moved back after experiencing the disadvantages of the Third World environment, are common.) In a substantial number of industries, low wages allowed developing countries to break into world markets. And so countries that had previously made a living selling jute or coffee started producing shirts and sneakers instead.

Workers in those shirt and sneaker factories are, inevitably, paid very little and expected to endure terrible working conditions. I say "inevitably" because their employers are not in business for their (or their workers') health; they pay as little as possible, and that minimum is determined by the other opportunities available to workers. And these are still extremely poor countries, where living on a garbage heap is attractive compared with the alternatives.

And yet, wherever the new export industries have grown, there has been measurable improvement in the lives of ordinary people. Partly this is because a growing industry must offer a somewhat higher wage than workers could get elsewhere in order to get them to move. More importantly, however, the growth of manufacturing--and of the penumbra of other jobs that the new export sector creates--has a ripple effect throughout the economy. The pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise. Where the process has gone on long enough--say, in South Korea or Taiwan--average wages start to approach what an American teen-ager can earn at McDonald's. And eventually people are no longer eager to live on garbage dumps. (Smokey Mountain persisted because the Philippines, until recently, did not share in the export-led growth of its neighbors. Jobs that pay better than scavenging are still few and far between.)

The benefits of export-led economic growth to the mass of people in the newly industrializing economies are not a matter of conjecture. A country like Indonesia is still so poor that progress can be measured in terms of how much the average person gets to eat; since 1970, per capita intake has risen from less than 2,100 to more than 2,800 calories a day. A shocking one-third of young children are still malnourished--but in 1975, the fraction was more than half. Similar improvements can be seen throughout the Pacific Rim, and even in places like Bangladesh. These improvements have not taken place because well-meaning people in the West have done anything to help--foreign aid, never large, has lately shrunk to virtually nothing. Nor is it the result of the benign policies of national governments, which are as callous and corrupt as ever. It is the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It is not an edifying spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful but nonetheless significantly better.

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?

The main answer, I think, is a sort of fastidiousness. Unlike the starving subsistence farmer, the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our benefit--and this makes us feel unclean. And so there are self-righteous demands for international labor standards: We should not, the opponents of globalization insist, be willing to buy those sneakers and shirts unless the people who make them receive decent wages and work under decent conditions.

This sounds only fair--but is it? Let's think through the consequences.

First of all, even if we could assure the workers in Third World export industries of higher wages and better working conditions, this would do nothing for the peasants, day laborers, scavengers, and so on who make up the bulk of these countries' populations. At best, forcing developing countries to adhere to our labor standards would create a privileged labor aristocracy, leaving the poor majority no better off.

And it might not even do that. The advantages of established First World industries are still formidable. 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. And since export-oriented growth, for all its injustice, has been a huge boon for the workers in those nations, anything that curtails that growth is very much against their interests. A policy of good jobs in principle, but no jobs in practice, might assuage our consciences, but it is no favor to its alleged beneficiaries.

You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be helped with foreign aid? Maybe--although the historical record of regions like southern Italy suggests that such aid has a tendency to promote perpetual dependence. Anyway, there isn't the slightest prospect of significant aid materializing. Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of course--but they won't, or at least not because we tell them to. And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard--that is, the fact that you don't like the idea of workers being paid a pittance to supply rich Westerners with fashion items.

In short, my correspondents are not entitled to their self-righteousness. They have not thought the matter through. And when the hopes of hundreds of millions are at stake, thinking things through is not just good intellectual practice. It is a moral duty.

 

[DrJ]

This thread needs some Paul Krugman.

In Praise of Cheap Labor

Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all.

By Paul Krugman

Friday, March 21, 1997

For many years a huge Manila garbage dump known as Smokey Mountain was a favorite media symbol of Third World poverty. Several thousand men, women, and children lived on that dump--enduring the stench, the flies, and the toxic waste in order to make a living combing the garbage for scrap metal and other recyclables. And they lived there voluntarily, because the $10 or so a squatter family could clear in a day was better than the alternatives.

The squatters are gone now, forcibly removed by Philippine police last year as a cosmetic move in advance of a Pacific Rim summit. But I found myself thinking about Smokey Mountain recently, after reading my latest batch of hate mail.

The occasion was an op-ed piece I had written for the New York Times, in which I had pointed out that while wages and working conditions in the new export industries of the Third World are appalling, they are a big improvement over the "previous, less visible rural poverty." I guess I should have expected that this comment would generate letters along the lines of, "Well, if you lose your comfortable position as an American professor you can always find another job--as long as you are 12 years old and willing to work for 40 cents an hour."

Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization--of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad.

But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

After all, global poverty is not something recently invented for the benefit of multinational corporations. Let's turn the clock back to the Third World as it was only two decades ago (and still is, in many countries). In those days, although the rapid economic growth of a handful of small Asian nations had started to attract attention, developing countries like Indonesia or Bangladesh were still mainly what they had always been: exporters of raw materials, importers of manufactures. Inefficient manufacturing sectors served their domestic markets, sheltered behind import quotas, but generated few jobs. Meanwhile, population pressure pushed desperate peasants into cultivating ever more marginal land or seeking a livelihood in any way possible--such as homesteading on a mountain of garbage.

Given this lack of other opportunities, you could hire workers in Jakarta or Manila for a pittance. But in the mid-'70s, cheap labor was not enough to allow a developing country to compete in world markets for manufactured goods. The entrenched advantages of advanced nations--their infrastructure and technical know-how, the vastly larger size of their markets and their proximity to suppliers of key components, their political stability and the subtle-but-crucial social adaptations that are necessary to operate an efficient economy--seemed to outweigh even a tenfold or twentyfold disparity in wage rates.

And then something changed. Some combination of factors that we still don't fully understand--lower tariff barriers, improved telecommunications, cheaper air transport--reduced the disadvantages of producing in developing countries. (Other things being the same, it is still better to produce in the First World--stories of companies that moved production to Mexico or East Asia, then moved back after experiencing the disadvantages of the Third World environment, are common.) In a substantial number of industries, low wages allowed developing countries to break into world markets. And so countries that had previously made a living selling jute or coffee started producing shirts and sneakers instead.

Workers in those shirt and sneaker factories are, inevitably, paid very little and expected to endure terrible working conditions. I say "inevitably" because their employers are not in business for their (or their workers') health; they pay as little as possible, and that minimum is determined by the other opportunities available to workers. And these are still extremely poor countries, where living on a garbage heap is attractive compared with the alternatives.

And yet, wherever the new export industries have grown, there has been measurable improvement in the lives of ordinary people. Partly this is because a growing industry must offer a somewhat higher wage than workers could get elsewhere in order to get them to move. More importantly, however, the growth of manufacturing--and of the penumbra of other jobs that the new export sector creates--has a ripple effect throughout the economy. The pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise. Where the process has gone on long enough--say, in South Korea or Taiwan--average wages start to approach what an American teen-ager can earn at McDonald's. And eventually people are no longer eager to live on garbage dumps. (Smokey Mountain persisted because the Philippines, until recently, did not share in the export-led growth of its neighbors. Jobs that pay better than scavenging are still few and far between.)

The benefits of export-led economic growth to the mass of people in the newly industrializing economies are not a matter of conjecture. A country like Indonesia is still so poor that progress can be measured in terms of how much the average person gets to eat; since 1970, per capita intake has risen from less than 2,100 to more than 2,800 calories a day. A shocking one-third of young children are still malnourished--but in 1975, the fraction was more than half. Similar improvements can be seen throughout the Pacific Rim, and even in places like Bangladesh. These improvements have not taken place because well-meaning people in the West have done anything to help--foreign aid, never large, has lately shrunk to virtually nothing. Nor is it the result of the benign policies of national governments, which are as callous and corrupt as ever. It is the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It is not an edifying spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful but nonetheless significantly better.

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?

The main answer, I think, is a sort of fastidiousness. Unlike the starving subsistence farmer, the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our benefit--and this makes us feel unclean. And so there are self-righteous demands for international labor standards: We should not, the opponents of globalization insist, be willing to buy those sneakers and shirts unless the people who make them receive decent wages and work under decent conditions.

This sounds only fair--but is it? Let's think through the consequences.

First of all, even if we could assure the workers in Third World export industries of higher wages and better working conditions, this would do nothing for the peasants, day laborers, scavengers, and so on who make up the bulk of these countries' populations. At best, forcing developing countries to adhere to our labor standards would create a privileged labor aristocracy, leaving the poor majority no better off.

And it might not even do that. The advantages of established First World industries are still formidable. 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. And since export-oriented growth, for all its injustice, has been a huge boon for the workers in those nations, anything that curtails that growth is very much against their interests. A policy of good jobs in principle, but no jobs in practice, might assuage our consciences, but it is no favor to its alleged beneficiaries.

You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be helped with foreign aid? Maybe--although the historical record of regions like southern Italy suggests that such aid has a tendency to promote perpetual dependence. Anyway, there isn't the slightest prospect of significant aid materializing. Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of course--but they won't, or at least not because we tell them to. And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard--that is, the fact that you don't like the idea of workers being paid a pittance to supply rich Westerners with fashion items.

In short, my correspondents are not entitled to their self-righteousness. They have not thought the matter through. And when the hopes of hundreds of millions are at stake, thinking things through is not just good intellectual practice. It is a moral duty.

Maybe I'm not correct on krugman's positions, but isn't he a supporter of our welfare state? This seems like a strange statement from him assuming that's the case.

 

[bueno]

When I had an office in San Luis Potosi, there used to be this little girl juggling balls on a street corner and then begging for money from stopped cars. I once asked her why she was there, and she told me because her daddy could,'t find work. I told her I would give her $20 USD if she would go home. She took the money with a great big smile and promised to go home.

Next day, she was back on the street corner. Eventually, I heard she got hit by a car and killed. Sure wish a sweat shop was an option for her. She was a cute kid.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

The Real Story Is Everywhere In China Where They're Not Making Apple Stuff

By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Friday, March 16, 2012, at 3:01 PM ET

Public radio's popular This American Life episode about abuses in the Foxconn factories that make Apple products has been retracted on the grounds of the "significant fabrications" it apparently contained. That's an embarassing moment for TAL, but even if the coverage had been fully accurate—or even in the cases where reporting on Apple's supply chain is spotless—I still think there's a deeply problematic solipsism in most of this reporting. Apple makes lots of stuff that lots of Americans own and therefore it's possible to make people feel a kind of psychic chain of guilt when they hear about bad conditions in the factories building the components. But this is a bit like the South By Southwest human hotspots problem, what Apple stands accused of is complicity in the misery of Chinese workers but its real crime often seems to be exposing our delicate western sensibilities to the misery.

You don't read articles about working conditions in factories making socks destined for export to Kazakhstan, and you don't read articles about working conditions on the rice farms that people eagerly leave to go toil in the sock factory. That rice and those socks are invisible to us and so too are the workers. What we need to see and hear about are bad conditions wherever they may be, not just the ones that provide the appealing news hook. When you read something bad about a Foxconn factory and then see that thousands of people line up for the chance of a job at one of them, that really ought to make you wonder. What were those guys doing the day before they decided to stand in line? How did that look? If you want to understand the depths of poverty that exist in the world, you can't just look under the streetlamp.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

This is a truly remarkable line from a review of the Moto X in The New York Times:

You get your customized phone within four days, courtesy of [the fact that] it’s assembled right here in these United States. The components are still made in Asia, but they’re put together in Texas — you can lose less sleep worrying about underpaid Chinese workers.

So reducing the demand for Chinese labor is somehow good for Chinese workers?

 

[johnnycakes]

This is a truly remarkable line from a review of the Moto X in The New York Times:

You get your customized phone within four days, courtesy of [the fact that] it’s assembled right here in these United States. The components are still made in Asia, but they’re put together in Texas — you can lose less sleep worrying about underpaid Chinese workers.

So reducing the demand for Chinese labor is somehow good for Chinese workers?

Actually... Chinese wages are going up considerably these days. China used to be the price leader in labor... no more. So looking at all costs considered overall, my bet is this has nothing to do at all with working conditions and everything to do with profits.

 

[cstu]

The other self-induced problem is the people have no self control when it comes to having kids. Very few people use birth control and it's considered a blessing to have many children even if you have no job and no way of supporting them. Even knocking up many different women and abandoning their children isn't considered a big deal.

Isn't having a kid in a poor country an economically profitable thing to do? If the kid can go out and beg or work or dig through trash, he can provide a net economic benefit to the family from a pretty young age. It's not like here where having a kid means a giant drain on your bank account for like 20 years.

What??? Sounds like a form of slavery to me. Lazy ### human procreates so the child can go do the work to support lazy ### human? Wouldn't it be a better idea for the human to not have the child, get up off ### and go work to support himself? I think so.

That's not really the way I've seen it happen in Africa. Rather than putting the kid to work for them it's the idea that they need someone to take care of them when they're old. Of course they love their family but there's the concern of what will happen to them when they physically can't work anymore (no social safety net in these countries). It's just the way it is and everybody does it - the people having kids to take care of them later in life are also taking care of their own elderly parents.

 

[cstu]

Here's my theory about why liberals are often the ones boycotting goods produced by sweatshops.

Normally, liberals try to be the champions of the poor.

In the U.S., the major party that most liberals identify with is the Democrats. That's because Democrats, more than Republicans, tend to champion liberal ideals. And I think there's a tendency for political homerism -- liberals are more apt to accept Democratic positions just because they come from Democrats (while conservatives are more apt to accept Republican positions just because they come from Republicans.)

But the Democrats don't always champion liberal ideals. Sometimes -- like Republicans -- they just cater to special interests. That's not a criticism of Democrats; it's just the reality of how our political system works. If you want to have a chance to get elected, you need campaign contributions, and to get campaign contributions, you have to cater to special interests. It's the American way.

Republicans and Democrats do not sell their special interest politicking as special interest politicking -- they sell it as what's good for the country as a whole. We need the farm bill not because Archer Daniels Midland gives politicians lots of money, but because we need to stabilize corn prices for the good of the country. We need to bail out Wall Street firms not because those companies give politicians lots of money, but to prevent the financial collapse of the entire nation. And so on.

Liberals and conservatives alike can get suckered by that kind of rhetoric when it comes from the Democrats or Republicans, respectively, since they are a sympathetic source.

I think that's what has happened, generally, on the issue of sweatshops.

American labor unions are strongly opposed to imported goods made in sweatshops. They're cheaper competition, and eliminating the competition benefits unions. Labor unions also tend to give a lot of money to the Democratic party, and thus Democratic politicians often take up positions favored by labor unions -- selling it not as what's best for labor unions, but as what's best for the world. A lot of liberals are sympathetic to such messages when they come from Democratic politicians. Democratic politicians smear sweatshops on behalf of labor unions, and a lot of liberals therefore oppose imported goods made in sweatshops. Because, without giving any credence to empirical evidence (or widely accepted economic theory), boycotting sweatshops is good for the world.

A true liberal, though -- in my estimation -- should look past special-interest-driven political rhetoric and look at what's really good for the world. And that involves studying the world -- the real world -- and taking stock of what consequences different policies have had on actual people who are actually affected by them.

When it comes to sweatshops, I don't think the evidence is ambiguous. I think it's pretty clear that boycotting sweatshops has sharply negative effects -- including starvation and sometimes death -- on the poorest people in the world. That's something true liberals should oppose even if labor unions don't like it.

I missed this before. This is an excellent, fair post.

I never saw this before. Absolutely true IMO. If liberals truly cared about the people working in sweatshops then their focus would be on improve working conditions rather than shutting them down.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

Africa Should Lure Bangladesh's Garment Industry