[bitcurious]

> Not a twist at all, it was pretty obvious that the reason those laborers worked there was because it was better than the alternatives.

I don’t find it obvious at all. Children don’t get to consider alternatives, they do as they are taught. That’s the whole problem with child labor.

[wutbrodo]

That's the problem though: the "let them eat cake" attitude that thinks that child labor in the developing world is driven by agency instead of resource constraints, and that the poorest children in the world would go be architects or engineers if only they weren't forced to work in sweatshops.

India's landmark child labor law passed in the 80s is a dramatic, tragic example of policy effects on this margin (though not driven by the same privileged ignorance as the Nike incident). When the law was passed, it lowered the welfare of the affected children and their families on pretty much every relevant metric: calories consumed, years of schooling, mortality, income/wealth, etc. The most stubborn advocate of ignoring the holistic consequences of policy might say it was all worth it, but the most damning thing is that _it increased hours of child labor per household_, coming largely from reduced time in school. Cracking down on child labor employers reduced demand for child labor, which reduced wages. But the problem is that labor supply was inelastic, where the choice was between child labor and starvation. The upshot was that children ended up working more for less money, a tragic lose-lose of a policy responsible for immense human suffering.

This isn't an argument for sweatshops per se; it's entirely possible that one can do the legwork and realize that the actual effect of a seemingly good policy is horribly negative. It's an argument that judging policies on how they affect your privileged sensibilities instead of what they do to the people they affect is despicable. Transmuting suffering in sweatshops to much worse suffering from starvation simply because the latter is easier to deny responsibility for is disgusting, but unfortunately the average person doesn't have the moral reasoning ability to understand this.