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Posted on 10/10/2003 8:06:05 PM PDT by new cruelty
Oct. 10 — Last month there were big protests when the World Trade Organization met in Cancun, Mexico. There are always protests when this meeting is held. OFTEN the protests are supported by American students who say workers are being mistreated
The students object to what they call sweatshops. They say companies are exploiting poor people, by setting up factories in developing countries and paying workers a fraction of American workers' wages.
The anti-sweatshop protesters appear to be winning the battle of public opinion. In 1996, they made Kathy Lee Gifford cry by saying she was exploiting young workers in Honduras who made her Wal-Mart clothing line. Within weeks, Gifford was admitting the error of her ways. She joined President Clinton at the White House, and renounced the mistakes of her past.
The student groups who protest get some of their funding from labor unions. The steelworkers' union lets "United Students Against Sweatshops" use part of their offices in Washington, D.C. Maybe that's why the protesting students are also upset about wages in America.
More recently, in 2001 student protesters took over the office of Harvard's president, and held it for three weeks, demanding a higher wage for workers at the school. This, too, is a popular cause. Their supporters camped outside, and actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck spoke at a rally to show their support. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., came out and shook the students' hands.
The national organizer of United Students Against Sweatshops, Ben McKean, assembled a group of student leaders to tell us why sweatshops must be changed.
"Workers have no choices about what their lives are, they have to go to work in these factories. The workers themselves have come to us and said, 'You benefit from our exploitation, give us back something," he said.
Good Intentions, Bad Results?
All that sounds very nice. But when we talked to some people who live in places where the workers are supposedly being exploited in sweatshops, we heard a different story.
We caught up with an economist and several policy analysts on their way to the World Trade Organization Meeting in Cancun. Bibek DeBroy, an economist who lives in India, said he wishes the protesters would "think with their brains rather than with their hearts." DeBroy said, "I don't understand the expression sweatshops. There's nothing wrong with sweat. Sweat is good. Sweat is what people in the developing world, including India, do all the time."
Doesn't the United States have the responsibility to stop companies from exploiting people in countries like India?
Kenya's June Arunga, who studies trade policy, doesn't think so. She said nobody in her country thinks about companies exploiting them. "When there's a new company opening a factory people are excited about it," she said.
Arunga and DeBroy point out that in poor countries, the Nike factories that rich American students call sweatshops routinely pay twice what local factories pay, and more than triple what people earn doing much harder and more dangerous work in the fields. Arunga says people in Kenya would volunteer to work in sweatshops for free, just to have access to clean running water and electricity without carrying firewood. "I wish we would have more sweatshops, quote unquote, in my country," Arunga told me. Most economists agree that "sweatshops" are what allowed people in now-thriving places like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore to work their way out of poverty.
A Win-Win Situation?
Arunga said, "People get jobs in these places, their generation lives better than their parents lived. Most of them work for these companies for a while, go off and start their own businesses, it's a win-win situation for everyone," she said.
And that, she says, is why the students who protest are ignorant and clueless.
"They're comparing that to what they have in their rich homes," she said, "They're people who are very wealthy. They have no idea what they're talking about." I told McKean and the student protesters that Arunga and DeBroy called people like them rich, ignorant and clueless.
I said they have an unrealistic idea of how they're going to make things nice in the third world.
"The image that we have as being rich and clueless and just idealist college students is a false one," said Mandie Yanasak.
"Do I have a vision of how I want the world to be? Sure. Of course I do. I want the world to be one where people don't have to struggle to feed their children," she said.
Lindsay-Marisol Enyart, another student, said, "We're talking about workers who don't have a choice and are forced to leave their home farms."
But who's forcing them? They aren't being chained and dragged into the factory.
If you insist on higher wages, I told the students, some of these factories will close, and people are going to be put out of work. Yanasak said, "We're not trying to close down sweatshops, we're trying to change sweatshops."
But Bibek DeBroy said if these students get their way, it won't help people in the developing world. "It would mean fewer jobs, lower incomes, more people in poverty," he said. Arunga agreed, saying, "By passing laws trying to improve the jobs by force, they will get rid of the jobs."
After the protests against Kathie Lee's clothing line, Wal-Mart withdrew its contract from one of the "sweatshops." American complaints about child labor persuaded factories in Bangladesh to stop hiring adolescents. The result, according to UNICEF, is many of the young girls turned to prostitution.
This helps poor people?
Give Me a Break.
kollege kidz do not care what the consequences of their actions are, they just want to change things. Apparently, they'd rather see Bangladeshi preteens go into prostitution than work in a factory.
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God Bless This Man! |
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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AND SAY THANKS TO JIM ROBINSON! It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
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Oh wait, I said that "work" word.
Sweat is especially good on Anna.
I think a return to sweatshops and child labor would be great. It lowers payroll costs, and keeps the smelly little people off the avenue when I'm driving or being chauffered. Better still would be to bring back indentured servitude, since many people are still too stupid to understand that being productive in a dangerous, crowded, heatstroke - inducing enviroment is is a far preferable condition than allowing them to misuse and waste "freedom".
Seventeen year old Piset, who spoke surprisingly good English, told me that when he was six he started selling souvenirs to tourists. He would make about 12 cents a day doing this. Several years later he started working in a factory that made the souvenirs, and usually made about 40 cents a day, but sometimes as much as 60 cents.
Then a few years ago, North Face apparel opened a factory in his hometown. He got a job there assembling backpacks. He now makes $3 a day and hopes to move to another job there that will pay $5 a day. In comparison, his older brother, who works for the government, makes about a dollar a day. Piset is now his family's main breadwinner, thanks to his job with North Face.
Whatever money he doesn't spend supporting his family, he's investing in his own business. He has two entrepreunurial ventures going now. He leases space in a market at a busy border town where he's hired his brother to manage the shop, which sells t-shirts and other souvenirs to tourists. He's also saving to buy a tuk tuk (motorcycle taxi). Once he owns that, he has the opportunity to make as much as $30 a day.
He also told me he's saving up money to go to college in America (although I'm not sure he realizes how much it costs to get to America, let alone four years of college). He wants to get the best education he can, but he wants to return to Cambodia after school to help his people.
Believe me, he could not be happier about working at the North Face factory. It's allowed him to support his family and hope for a better future. This boy beamed with pride when he talked about how well off he was (relatively) and how he's able to help his family. He certainly didn't evoke any sympathy over his "exploitation".
And what Stossel wrote is true. Those who don't have this kind of opportunity usually resort to prostitution. It's the only other "job" that pays enough to support a family.
I wish gullible bleeding-heart leftists could have this kind of encounter with people like Piset, rather than having this faux, pseudo-intellectual notion that they're actually helping them by decrying "sweatshops".
Sadly, emotion and hyperbole often win debates like this rather than facts, logic, and reason.
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