My essay is going to be about sweatshop labor and how I consider it to be a good thing, while my teacher thinks it is a horrible thing.
Saying it's good is too vague. Why is it good? You could argue that it promotes economic efficiency. You could also argue that it's "bad" because it requires the use of coercion and deception...and the treatment of individuals as mere means to an end.
Look into shareholder and stakeholder theory of business. You should be able to formulate a decent argument using the ideas from either or both, though I will warn you, the stakeholder theory sounds quite nice but is a backdoor to Socialism and Communism. If you need to argue ethical theories, look into Kantian ethics (the prevailing and accepted theory in academia), utilitarianism, and possibly egoism, but make sure to understand the difference between a descriptive (that's the way things work) claim and a normative (that's the way things should work) claim.
If the people in other countries did not need the income, they wouldn’t do the work for those wages.
And there are sweatshops in America.
The founder of American Apparel (a Canadian immigrant) makes a big stink about how his product is made in America but he likes importing cheap foreign labor (and has pushed to naturalize illegal immigrants).
I hear about fair trade coffee. And boycott sweatshops. And champion undocumented immigrant labor working below established wages.
Why don’t I ever hear about fair trade R&D in tech industry? Degreed tech jobs have been offshored to India for cheap wages and the product smuggled back into this nation (without import duty) through the internet (millions of dollars in software effort).
I guess it all depends on which demographic you belong to. White collar workers are just supposed to accept a “changing” marketplace.