Dignity and Compromise: Sweatshop Labor in Asia

by Brad Hirn

Political conservatives and defenders of capitalist globalization have taken a disturbing position in the debate over sweatshop labor. They speak of compromise and of realistic possibilities for economic improvement. They claim that the sweatshop is the best way to help impoverished workers survive under the global economy. The logic is that as long as people have some kind of work, however dangerous, low-paying, and undignified, we of the U.S. Left should not protest the conditions under which workers labor.

In the first chapter of their book Thunder From the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn defend this position:

Fourteen years ago, we moved to Asia and began reporting there. Like most Westerners, we arrived in the region outraged at sweatshops. In time, though, we came to accept the view supported by most Asians: that the campaign against sweatshops risks harming the very people it is intended to help. For beneath their grime, sweatshops are a clear sign of the industrial revolution that is beginning to reshape Asia.

Kristof and WuDunn report their conversations with Asian laborers who were happy to work in sweatshops because the $2 per hour wage for a nine-hour shift seven days a week provides an additional mosquito net and sufficient food for their children. It is across Thailand, China, South Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia, countries that make up the Sweatshop Belt, that economic growth in Asia is most vibrant. For evidence of improvement, Kristof and WuDunn cite wage increases over the past decade, improved factory conditions, and middle-class amenities such as a private housing market and computer schools for higher-income workers. The industrial revolution is sweeping Asia, and sweatshops are making it possible. Kristof and WuDunn write, "Today these sweatshop countries control about one-quarter of the global economy."

This position is morally abysmal and blatantly privileges the middle and upper classes of the world. I do not blame a Thai worker for taking a sewing job in a t-shirt factory. He is striving to make ends meet, and severe risks – getting stabbed in the hand by the sewing machine, suffering back pain from hunching over the machine, or contracting stomach disease from rancid meat provided by the manager – must be tolerated. The $1 or $2 per hour wage is too important.

Across the Sweatshop Belt, millions of workers, including women and children, match the above description. They are being forced to compromise their safety and submit to the capitalist illusion that wealth will spread throughout the population. The United Nations' 2005 Human Development Report makes clear the failure of capitalist methods of trade and economic growth:

The clash on world poverty centers on the US policy of promoting growth and trade liberalization on the assumption that this will trickle down to the poor … Growth alone will not reduce poverty so long as the poor are denied full access to health, education and other social provisions …
India and China, the UN says, have been very successful in wealth creation but have not enabled the poor to share in the process …
The only way to eradicate poverty, [the report] says, is to target inequalities.

If we are going to speak of compromise, then let us ask these questions: What compromise is made by the CEO of the multinational corporation? What compromise is made by the U.S. consumer who, trained to ignore the production of a given product, only responds to the price tag? To claim that U.S. consumers or corporate CEOs are compromising is ludicrous. This is a heavily one-sided deal in which workers are made complicit in their own poverty and are made powerless to stop it.

That people have jobs is not enough. Work, as a cornerstone of any society, ought to be dignified, safe, and sustaining of the worker. Sweatshops exist for the sole purpose of accumulating profits for the private companies that operate them. We must recognize that as long as profit is the fundamental goal, people will lose.