[colmvp]

So, I remember seeing this on Reddit a few weeks back.

Some commenters mentioned that sweatshops are a necessary evil for developing nations. It's better to have a shitty job than to have the alternative of being jobless and resorting to theft/prostitution for sustenance.

How true is such an argument?

[savanaly]

One of my all time favorite pop economics essays is by Paul Krugman, addressing this topic:

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...

His argument is summed up thus:

"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."

[xorcist]

"No realistic alternative" -- that's a bit of a dishonest either/or argument. Of course there are alternatives. It's not like it hasn't happened before.

In the Western world this gave rise to the biggest social movement in a century, with demands to assure workers all kind of rights.

Krugman needs to motivate why we should deny third world children the same rights we demanded for our own a hundred and forty years ago, if he really wants to make that argument.

[pluma]

I'd argue that Europe in the Industrialisation was in a slightly different situation because the world economy wasn't as globalized yet.

If Cambodian labourers unionize and become more expensive, the business could easily move to the next third-world country, leaving them economically worse off than before.

The problem is that the suppliers they work for are as dependent on the international companies paying them as their workers are dependent on them.

Basically, either the international companies have to act against their immediate economical interests and invest money in improving the working conditions and pay at their suppliers, or the suppliers in different countries would have to "unionize", too.

Alternatively, all labourers in all countries would have to unionize in the same timeframe (so the business can't just keep country-hopping) or the businesses would have to be forced to act against their own interests.

I think the most realistic sequence of events is that as the national economy in each country improves their workers begin to unionize and within a few decades the conditions may have improved universally. But that won't be an easy process and will likely result in a lot more protests and violence than the alternatives.

The naive ideal would be that customers force the businesses to pressure the suppliers to improve the situation, but outside a few marketing stunts I don't think that is very likely. All previous calls for boycotts have been unsuccessful and the average citizen doesn't care enough about these issues to do anything politically (aside from the obvious difficulty of out-lobbying the established lobbies).

We'll see.

[mbrock]

Sweatshops as a necessary evil has been a hallmark of the ideology of capital ever since 19th century Britain. The 1844 book by Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, basically a report on the sweatshops of the time, was a huge influence on Marx. From the preface:

> Having, at the same time, ample opportunity to watch the middle-classes, your opponents, I soon came to the conclusion that you are right, perfectly right in expecting no support whatever from them. Their interest is diametrically opposed to yours, though they always will try to maintain the contrary and to make you believe in their most hearty sympathy with your fates. Their doings give them the lie. I hope to have collected more than sufficient evidence of the fact, that -- be their words what they please -- the middle-classes intend in reality nothing else but to enrich themselves by your labour while they can sell its produce, and to abandon you to starvation as soon as they cannot make a profit by this indirect trade in human flesh. What have they done to prove their professed goodwill towards you? Have they ever paid any serious attention to your grievances? Have they done more than paying the expenses of half-a-dozen commissions of inquiry, whose voluminous reports are damned to everlasting slumber among heaps of waste paper on the shelves of the Home Office? Have they even done as much as to compile from those rotting blue-books a single readable book from which everybody might easily get some information on the condition of the great majority of "free-born Britons"? Not they indeed, those are things they do not like to speak of -- they have left it to a foreigner to inform the civilised world of the degrading situation you have to live in.

[atdt]

The argument here is that the middle class acts in self-interest while feigning sympathy for the working poor. Maybe so, but the argument neither affirms nor denies the necessity or utility of sweatshops.

[fnordfnordfnord]

I started to make the argument here that sweatshops weren't ever necessary, but it's moot since they certainly aren't now, thanks to automation.

[samastur]

Not true because it focuses on options job seekers have instead of conditions companies could provide. The cost of labor in product prices is usually so small that in most cases you could offer better conditions without noticeably higher prices.

[sjtrny]

It is definitely not a neccesary evil. Minimum wage in those countries could be increased (or one created and enforced) so that there is a dramatic improvement on the workers lives without much of an impact on the end consumer. Consider how cheap a t-shirt is in the U.S. However politicians are scared since they think it will drive business out of their country. Or they are corrupt.

[runeks]

> Minimum wage in those countries could be increased (or one created and enforced) so that there is a dramatic improvement on the workers lives without much of an impact on the end consumer.

I think it makes sense to ask ourselves: why did a Western company move production from the West to this country in the first place? Probably because of lower wages.

Increasing the minimum wage is not a solution if the reason these workers have a job in the first place is that their labor is cheap.

[josefresco]

What about the people who don't work at the factory? Do they get a pay raise too?

[Cthulhu_]

> Consider how cheap a t-shirt is in the U.S.

you mean how cheap it can be. T-shirts range anywhere from $1 to $100 and probably more, but that money doesn't trickle down to the people making those shirts in the end.

[louhike]

I wonder if minimum wage can be increased if the economy isn't pretty solid or at least growing fast.

[fmdud]

The jury's out on whether or not this is "true", as macroeconomics tends to not be an exact science by any means.

What strikes me is how comforting the idea is for us as the wealthy; if the companies have an agenda to have us believe this (which they do) and the idea is very comforting (which it is), it only really matters whether we can be convinced that it's true.

[CmonDev]

There is no guaranteed minimum income even in developed nations (not even with those huge debts). Most likely thing to happen is that those sweatshops will become automated and the population will have to drop to pre-industrialisation levels.

[fmdud]

I've never been a big fan of the "it would be OK if they all just went away" line of thinking.

[CmonDev]

I did not say it's OK, this just a likely scenario, unfortunately.

[Cederfjard]

I'm sorry, can you explain to me how your statement relates to your parent comment? That's a genuine question, I'm frustrated because I'm confused about what you mean. Where did s/he say anything that can be construed as "it would be OK if they all just went away", and what does that even mean in this context? Excuse me if I'm being dumb right now.

[pingswept]

Referring to this part, I suspect: "population will have to drop to pre-industrialisation levels"

[Cederfjard]

Thanks, I can kinda see it now.

[johnchristopher]

There seems to exist a tendency to move sweatshops to countries with less effective work(er) protection laws rather than automating jobs (eg: from China to Vietnam and so on).

[TeMPOraL]

That's because people are still cheaper than robots. This won't last forever if current trends continue.

[xorcist]

But it will, as long as you can lock up children and force them to work off some debt.

Free labour is one of the things which led to the fall of the Roman empire. Nobody needs technology when you have slaves. And there are a lot of slaves in the world, just read the latest UN report on it.

[TeMPOraL]

But poor children still need to eat, sleep and it takes a while to replace them when they wear out. Machines on the other hand can run 24/7, on just electricity, and there are both practical and economical systems already in place that will let you replace broken ones with new ones quickly. I think machines will be cheaper long before sweatshops run out of children.

[CmonDev]

Also: higher quality and a feel-good brand factor "we don't use child labor anymore".

[Cederfjard]

Yes, but that is under current circumstances, which will probably not remain fixed forever, right? How long before that dynamic changes and automation is suddenly better, closer to home AND cheaper?

[macarthy12]

The "tendency" was due to american protectionism and quotas introduced during the nixon era google the "Multi-Fiber Arrangement"

[johnchristopher]

Interesting, indeed.

[michaelcampbell]

There's a good arc in NPR's Planet Money that touches on this angle. Not necessarily the need for this labor, but how the work travels around developing nations and what it means.

I forget the title, but the series is essentially how they design a T-Shirt for the show, then follow how it's made; from the cotton harvesting up to the final shipping container hitting the US. It should be easy to locate.

[angeNoble]

For the lazy:

http://www.npr.org/series/248799434/planet-moneys-t-shirt-pr...

http://seedtoshirt.tumblr.com/

[lukasm]

Sadly, it is true. If you increase min wage in one country, the business will move to another. You would need to increase it everywhere. Assuming that's possible you would still need to deal with corruption.

What makes things worse (at least short term) it's automation. In 10 years robots will do this kind of job.

Historically, all nations developed with this brutal process. Many without minimum wage.

[mcv]

> What makes things worse (at least short term) it's automation. In 10 years robots will do this kind of job.

The problem isn't automation, it's that our economy is designed to make automation a bad thing. In a better system, automation would give us higher productivity and more free time. But we designed our system so that free time is a bad thing unless you're rich. People need jobs to eat, so there has to be enough work, so anything that reduces the amount of work, threatens people's livelihood.

That's the problem of our society in a nutshell. The gains of automation only go to the people at the top. They should be going to the people at the bottom.

[pluma]

I can't express how much I agree with this sentiment.

Automation reduces the requirement of human labour. It increases our productivity. That should be a good thing. I'm in the business of putting people out of their job[0] -- that should be something we strive for. A few decades ago we believed that technology would create a utopia by doing this because we would barely ever have to work yet be as productive as ever.

Sadly our culture has this perverse fetish for needless work. You must have a job to make money because you need to make money to survive. And if your job becomes easier and you have to work less to achieve the same levels of productivity, either your work must expand to fill the gap or your pay gets reduced to reflect the reduction in work.

If we paid by productivity, even unskilled labour would guarantee ample pay.

[0]: Anyone working in the tech industry is, ultimately. Although many products result in the creation of "non-jobs" (essentially, the commercial equivalent of bureaucracy), that's merely a stepping stone and at least partially a byproduct of the mentality that more jobs are a good thing.

[uniclaude]

Has there ever been a working system where this wasn't the case? I think I agree with you on this, but I lack of data points to back the argument.

[zhte415]

I'm not talking about T-shirts here, which are usually extremely price sensitive, but high-street brands that sell a shirt for $30 or a pair of trousers/pants for $50-100.

A change in cost for suppliers of these products doesn't move business from one country to another. And the margin a supplier makes varies greatly.

A lot of products sourced in high-street brands comes from a variety of the same global suppliers (some of which sub-contract, some do in-house, and some sub-sub contract). One month from one supplier, and another month from another (varying by continent, country, to in-country location), for a pretty much identical product. One supplier may make 10% margin, and another 25%. It is of concern to the purchaser that a supplier doesn't make much of a margin, as they're feared as being pushed under, but puzzlement that these suppliers stay in business for decades. What is more important is turn-around time. A high-street brand needs a design idea to go from cat-walk to hanger in weeks, not months. That means logistics have to be extremely tight - design sent (electronically), prototypes mocked and air-mailed back, BOM sourced and often imported (at least in part), and the super-price sensitive suppliers just can't deliver here, whatever the margin, let alone the Q+A. A day turnaround and assurance of delivery time can make a difference more important than 5-15% on the quote.

When it comes to cheap textile production, or production of the lowest quality product then yes, price sensitivity is important. But when it comes to delivering mid-level textile products logistics trump jumping to the lowest margin location (where lack of logistical facilities, bribes, un-predictable delays).

I agree things can often improve, but minimum wage has little to do with it. A functional port and road to a factory are far more important in being competitive than how much a worker costs (except for the cheapest of cheapest textile products).

[fnordfnordfnord]

>What makes things worse (at least short term) it's automation.

Automation isn't the boogey man, we are.

>In 10 years robots will do this kind of job.

That may not be true if there is a willing supply of practically free labor.

[pluma]

I'm reminded of the story about how the ancient Greek practically invented the steam engine but only used it as a toy because the wide availability of practically free labour (via slaves) meant the development of automation wouldn't have been economically viable.

The more jobs we automate, the more we devalue unskilled labour. I wished we would live in a world where this could universally be agreed upon to be a good thing.

[Throwaway1224]

Here's a modern economist who puts together a well formed argument: http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Powellsweatshop...