Wilso wrote:Thomas wrote:A free labor market does an adequate job at creating reasonable working conditions and wages, thank you very much.
Tell that to the children slaving in Asian sweatshops. I just can't believe the level of naivety/stupidity that I see on this site at times.
No problem at all, because if these sweatshops weren't there, these children would be slaving on farms, in prostitution, and in other professions which are much worse than sweatshop labor. You see, misery was not recently introduced to East Asia for the benefit of multinational corporations. It has been existing there forever, and the contribution of global capitalism is to make things better -- though maybe not good enough for you. By contrast, labor unions played a minor role in raising Taiwanese wages from third world levels to first world levels. The same is true for Hong Kong, Singapoore, South Korea, and most other Asian countries where wages increased dramatically over the last few decades. You may well find it worthwile to check the facts before accusing your opponents of stupidity and naivite.
If you're interested, Paul Krugman, an economist with fairly good liberal credentials, gives you an entry point to what the real effect of sweatshops is in the following New York Times article, of which I quote the relevant excerpt.
In the New York Times of April 22, 2001, Paul Krugman wrote: [C]ould 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 point is that third-world countries aren't poor because their export workers earn low wages; it's the other way around. Because the countries are poor, even what look to us like bad jobs at bad wages are almost always much better than the alternatives: millions of Mexicans are migrating to the north of the country to take the low-wage export jobs that outrage opponents of Nafta. And those jobs wouldn't exist if the wages were much higher: the same factors that make poor countries poor ?- low productivity, bad infrastructure, general social disorganization ?- mean that such countries can compete on world markets only if they pay wages much lower than those paid in the West.
You can read the full article
here. For really extensive data material, the
Foreign Labor Statistics homepage at the American Bureau of Labor Statistics
