Work in sweatshops? No sweat!

To westerners and other citizens of industrialized nations, the conditions in sweatshops are horrid. How can we, as compassionate human beings, sit back and enjoy our flat-screen TV's, high-end cars, and gigantic houses, when young children no older than 14 spend 12 hours a day, 6 days a week toiling away in working conditions we wouldn't wish upon our worst enemies? I mean, these kids are denied bathroom breaks, exposed to dangerous chemicals, and subjected to numerous safety hazards. Any factory in the United States that did this would be immediately shut down.

But these sweatshops are not in the United States, Canada, England, Germany, or other high-income economies. Would these children work in such heart-wrenching conditions if they had better options? Put simply, no they wouldn't.

In outrage, Americans often enact policies that punish firms profiting off the cheap labor of sweatshops. However, ask any family whose children are working in a sweatshop, and they would be aghast at the thought of people purchasing less from these sweatshops.

Princeton economist Paul Krugman offers a [true] grisly tale about the effects of limiting imports from sweatshops:
"[Could] anything be worse than having children work in sweatshops? Alas, yes. In 1993, child workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets -- and that a significant number were forced into prostitution."
 (The full New York Times article can be found by clicking here.)


If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, surely any such legislation such as the import ban mentioned above is a guaranteed path to eternal doom.


On the contrary, sweatshops are the path out of economic bust for most lesser-developed countries. As stated by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, "The simplest way to help the poorest Asians would be to buy more from sweatshops, not less."
"Read the article at: Two Cheers for Sweatshops."

According to a 2006 article in The Economist magazine, "No matter how awful we might consider the sweatshops of the developing world, if hundreds of people are queuing to get those jobs, it is obvious that whatever the alternatives are must be worse.   For many people in poor countries, factory jobs replace things like subsistence farming or prostitution; it would be no kindness to them to insist on wages or working conditions that would price their labour out of the global marketplace.  And as countries get richer, thanks to the gains from trade, they generally do adopt stricter labour regulations and more environmentally friendly practices."


Click here to read the full article. 


For a more in-depth analysis of the benefits sweatshops provide, read Chapter 12 of Charles Wheelan's Naked Economics,  Trade and Globalization.