I’ve seen sweatshops before and there’s no defending them, especially since exploitative child labor is usually involved.
The only thing worse than a 3rd world country being exploited, is not being exploited.
As someone whom has seen sweatshops before. I think that there has to be something mentally, morally and emotionally wrong with you if you think sweatshops are worthy of defending.
Define: Sweatshop NOUN:
A shop or factory in which employees work long hours at low wages under poor conditions.
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I was first going to comment, before watching the video regarding how definitions of capitalism have actually changed. But...the video makes a correct explanation of the notion on how real capitalism benefits the workers.
What has changed, which the video fails to properly define, is the term “sweatshop.” The workers he describes in the video are highly paid in contrast to their countrymen. The pictures used do not show dirty, poorly lit, children sitting there pouring hot silicone into molds to make silly rubber bands for kids to wear in America.
The video is not talking about the true hellholes of sweatshops which are by nature, anti-capitalist and counter productive. The video is simply defending what liberals call low wages in a third world country...which in fact are decent jobs in the country moving the folks beyond their poverty.
He is using the term “sweatshop” as liberals define it, not as it is truly defined or commonly understood by real capitalists.
I don’t like the uphill battle against the characterization sweatshop. If it’s a job why call it a sweatshop?
“Between 1990 and 2002 more than 174 million people escaped poverty in China, about 1.2 million per month. With an estimated $23 billion in Chinese exports in 2005 (out of a total of $713 billion in manufacturing exports), Wal-Mart might well be single-handedly responsible for bringing about 38,000 people out of poverty in China each month, about 460,000 per year. It is unlikely that there is any single organization on the planet that alleviates poverty so effectively for so many people.” Walmart outperforms world bank in reducing world poverty - “China is the most populous country, with 1.3 billion people, most still poor enough to willingly move hundreds of miles from home for jobs that would be shunned by anyone with better prospects.” About half a million of these people each year would be stuck in rural poverty that is, for most of them, far worse than sweatshop labor. most of the sweatshops workers in Japan in the 1950s and 60s, as well as the most of the sweatshop workers in Taiwan and South Korea in the 1970s and 80s, are now middle class retirees in developed nations. Likewise most of the “underpaid” Chinese workers of today will retire in a state of comfort and luxury unimaginable to them in their rural youth, as average Chinese wages will gradually rise just as they have risen in every other nation that has experienced long-term economic growth. At present rates of economic growth, China will reach a U.S. standard of living in 2031.
Paul Krugman, one of the most aggressively left-liberal economists writing today, understands how economic growth helps the poor:
“These improvements ... [are] the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It is not an edifying spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful but nonetheless significantly better.”
The Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas once said “Once you start thinking about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else.” Non-economists, especially those associated with the environmental movement, regard this as evidence that economics is a form of brain damage, a cancer on our earth. But rural Chinese peasants surviving on less than a dollar per day do not regard economic growth, or Wal-Mart factory jobs, as a cancer. When a Mongolian student at a U.S. workshop on globalization heard U.S. college students denounce sweatshops, he shouted: “Please give us your sweatshops!
http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2006/08/forget-the-world-bank-try-wal-mart.html
The problem is, many times, local bosses can abuse their positions of authority. While the developing world already is in a labor pricing war between one another (e.g., $1/day in one country vs $1.25/day in another), a local boss can continue to make it worse. He/she can threaten a local worker with termination if the worker refuses to work long gruelling hours. The local boss can drive the wages even further down and pocket a greater share of the profits. And this is where multi-national corporations, with their greater leverge can help out, pressing local governments for greater labor oversight.
While many of these liberal "white youths" from priviledge backgrounds may not understand the full economic picture, I find their activism useful in bringing to light absuive conditions that can occur in 3rd world countries.