The western school of thought regarding sweatshops dictates that they are evil, inhumane vehicles, used for making the poor poorer and the rich richer. The problem with this belief is that it is Western, when sweatshops are a predominantly Asian and South American occurrence. Taking the non-Western lifestyle into deliberation, we must reconsider whether sweatshops are simply imposed systems of slavery without beneficiary elements, or relatively benign stepping stones on the road to economic success.
According to CorpWatch1, an organization dedicated to policing corporations, a sweatshop is a workplace where workers are subject to extreme exploitation, poor working conditions, and physical/psychological abuse. These terms are not always applicable to the businesses we deem sweatshops. ‘Extreme exploitation’ is described as receiving low pay or below minimum wages. In 2000, the California minimum wage was $5.752, while sweatshops there paid their employees only $5.18 an hour. However, this amount was above the federal minimum of $5.15. According to law, the legal minimum is the higher wage. In Shanghai the minimum was $.21 per hour2. Nevertheless, the California wages were considered ‘exploitation’.
Twenty-one cents an hour is regarded as good pay to many of these workers. One girl in Bangkok makes roughly $.022 per hour3, or $2 for nine hour shifts. For her and her family, this is something to be proud of. If her factory was closed down, she would have difficulty finding a job of similar situation. A Nicaraguan worker regarded the prospect of a closed factory as ‘a crisis’4. The laborers there need the factories to survive. Many of them worry that there are not enough hours to work.
Allegations of poor working conditions and abuse are also blown out of proportion. The Nicaraguan sweatshops oversee a flow of vendors selling food to the workers during their lunch breaks. Some have air-conditioning, child-care centers, and medical clinics. Security measures viewed as menacing and unnecessary are actually worldwide standard precautions used to prevent tax-free international goods from being stolen. Accusations of sexual harassment were found to be based on routine security pat-downs, and workers have denied observing any abuse. Another charge was of underage labor. Nicaraguan law permits 14 year-olds to work full-time5, and the average age of Nicaraguan sweatshop workers is 274.
In the event of child labor, it often does not deserve the stigma it receives. My mother, born in post-war South Korea, witnessed its benefits. Many of her friends worked from an early age—boys shined shoes and girls worked on farms picking potatoes. The added income allowed the adults of the family to pursue work in factories, and eventually move to higher, developing jobs. In the end, if sweatshops are in fact tolerable, where is the problem?
The problem lies in our paradigm of acceptable standards of living. Americans are used to luxury lifestyles, and the obsession with converting others to such a lifestyle is unreasonable. Reality concedes that sweatshops aid at least in achieving the standards of life. In an alternative world without sweatshops, how would billions of poverty-stricken people survive? In areas without sweatshops, poverty-related deaths are abundant, where a $1 wage per day may have saved lives3. Americans fail to see the difference between quality of life and standards of living.
The American GDP per capita is $40,1006, while the Chinese GDP per capita is $5,6007. In a country that is proclaimed to be the next economic powerhouse, this figure seems meager in comparison to our own. This observation can be flipped to reveal that China makes more efficient use of its income to power its economy. Perhaps China’s sweatshops are not only mediums of Western profit, but great domestic profit as well. Such means of success has been utilized before, in the sweatshops of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and most famously, America.
The Industrial Revolution combined with Irish immigration fostered the first sweatshops. This occurrence was essentially a matter of supply and demand. The immigrants created a flux in supply, and therefore accepted the sweatshop conditions. These workers were able to accumulate savings and move on to invest in better industries. As capital amassed, the positions they had formerly been eager to take became less and less desirable, and new laborers willing to submit to low wages filled their places. This fundamental principle of capitalism became a cornerstone of the American economy, now the strongest in the world.
China has potential to become far greater than America. Its population, at 1.3 billion, is 440% of the American population, and its per capita has been doubling every ten years3. Sweatshops are at the very base of its fast growth, and are in full demand. In fact, there are not enough to sate the nation of 1.3 billion citizens. In urban areas, there is a 9.8% unemployment rate and a 20% rate in rural areas7.

The increasing Western distaste for sweatshops is partly caused by the generalization of the term ‘sweatshop’. The organization Sweatshop Watch9 classified the California business mentioned2, which paid its workers $5.15 rather than the state minimum of $5.75, as a sweatshop due to its ‘exploitative’ wages. But does a sixty cent difference in pay really take advantage of a laborer? It is arguable that a laborer cannot be exploited, since they work by free will.
One exception to this case is Wal-Mart, which is such a huge economic power that it exercises a virtual monopsony and therefore can impact the wages of a factory. If it so chooses, it could effect the wages of several factories, and thus dictate the local economy. Such unusual power does induce alarm at potential misconduct in sweatshops.
Small businesses, in contrast, do not have such influence over factories, and therefore cannot affect wages or management. They do not have moral obligations to the workers that manufacture their products. Companies exist to obtain profit; sweatshops are oftentimes the most efficient means of achieving economic success. However, does this mean that large corporations are obligated to raise the standard in foreign manufacturing, due to their influence? Even with the resources to ameliorate working conditions, it is not necessarily beneficial to act upon them. If Nike or Wal-Mart decided to pay their foreign workers enough money to detach them from the term “sweatshop” there would be a social upheaval. To what lengths would people go to obtain these jobs? More importantly, to what lengths would they go to keep them? Because the actions of these corporations affect—unlike local government—only several factories at most, alleviating conditions in select areas has more potential for mistreatment than the situation at present. Disparate treatment would at best allow a select few to rise economically, and create tensions. Others would still work at sweatshops or remain unemployed.
Modern times have introduced globalization, and inevitably, outsourcing. The cheapest labor possible is sought, and by sending work overseas to sweatshops, the cycle of supply and demand is fulfilled. Without cheap foreign labor, small businesses would be forced to employ less people to afford the higher prices of domestic labor. Sweatshops are a necessary component in retaining our economy.
Sweatshops are not the quintessentially evil things we often perceive them to be. Companies reported to use sweatshops are often boycotted, and those that do not announce their ‘sweatshop-free’ status proudly. However, few people stop to consider that by closing down a sweatshop, laborers willing to work under such poor conditions and low pay would become jobless and consequently penniless. Sweatshops have proven to be beneficial to both their employees and employers. While supporting the imported country’s goods, the host country is developing and accumulating capital. The countries that utilized sweatshops earlier have also grown to economic power earlier. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan attest to this, as they are now highly-educated nations with low infant mortality rates8. Countries wishing to follow in their footsteps, so to speak, such as India, China, and other Asian and South American countries, should be allowed to do so and supported.


Work Cited

1. http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=108
2. http://www.sweatshopwatch.org/index.php?s=67
3. http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000924mag-sweatshops.html
4. http://www.aworldconnected.org/article.php/507.html
5. http://www.country-studies.com/nicaragua/labor.html
6. http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html
7. http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.html
8. http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
9. http://www.sweatshopwatch.org/

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