[beaconstudios]

> and they become less poor afterwards.

This doesn't happen when you're paid subsistence wages, which sweatshop workers are. It's exploitation of the poor, pure and simple - there's no trickle-down economics in play, they just get to stay poor but alive while the goods they make are sold to wealthier countries.

It would be really nice if free markets played out the way free market advocates say they do, but they don't.

> But the way it will play out, means that there's always a gradient of relative "conditions"

Personally, I'd rather we lived in a meritocratic system where hard work and innovation benefits the individual responsible, and everybody earns the value of their work. I don't like the idea of a perpetual underclass based on characteristics unrelated to personal capability, like nationality or race.

[ericmay]

>This doesn't happen when you're paid subsistence wages, which sweatshop workers are

How did any country ever become wealthy? The US and UK for example went through the Industrial Revolution too, where people were paid subsistence wages and worked in sweatshops...

[dragonwriter]

> The US and UK for example went through the Industrial Revolution too, where people were paid subsistence wages and worked in sweatshops...

Then they had mass, deadly, pro- and anti-labor violence culminating in various labor protections which resulted in a less-miserable distribution of the rewards of industry, a process which has been interspersed with backsliding and repetition over time.

[ericmay]

Right and so then they became less poor afterward.

[beaconstudios]

This argument boils down to "it was a good thing we exploited them, it gave them the impetus to fight back against our exploitation". Is this meant to be a dialectical argument or just a really weird moral one?

[ericmay]

> and they become less poor afterwards.

> This doesn't happen when you're paid subsistence wages, which sweatshop workers are.

I’m just trying to figure out if this is true or not. Seems to me the evidence is clear that such workers become wealthier over time. China, the United States, United Kingdom, and others seem to be clear examples of that.

Injecting a moral argument here doesn’t change the practical reality of how the world works. The opportunities presented to sweat shop workers are not great, and often times working at a sweatshop is the least bad option. But my point of contention was with this exchange of comments. I do think sweatshop workers become less poor over time, and the evidence I see is present in many countries where this happened.

[beaconstudios]

the payment of subsistence wages is not what leads people to become wealthier over time. The reaction to the oppression of subsistence wages, leading to workers' rights movements, is. At least, that's the case in the UK and the USA - China was never a sweatshop country before the revolution, and now it is in some areas, so it's not an example of overcoming sweatshop work at all.

My point is that sweatshop workers become less poor when they become tired enough of their conditions to rise up against their masters, not because they are able to put together savings or anything like that.