Attacking Defending Sweatshops

Bhagwati’s main argument defending sweatshops calls out opponents for being uninformed and emotionally driven, such that although their “intended consequence” seems just, their actions lead to “actual consequences” that makes opposition to sweatshops unjust. Working conditions aside, Bhagwati informs us that there should be no push for a “living wage” because different people define it differently, because poor countries are bound to have low wages, and because sweatshop wages are being unfairly compared to purchase prices when they should be checked against economical “value added”. Additionally, he notes that western boycotts of sweatshop goods hurts poor countries because the wages from sweatshops decreases the number of poor people in those countries.

First of all, I don’t agree with some of Bhagwati’s points. As we have learned, just because it is “difficult” to define a living wage does not mean that it is impossible or should not be done. He also seems to contradict himself somewhat. While he claims that westerners paying for sweatshop-created goods will help pull the poor out of poverty, in response to the suggestion of increasing pathetic wages he seems to shrug and say “eh, the poor will be poor”. I think that he is trivializing the scale of the problem. Sure, the sweatshops exist to employ the poor but they can’t be paid much in a poor country. Well, perhaps then our issue expands to establishing a functioning economy in poor countries that don’t require the use (see: exploitation) of extremely young workers. Bhagwati mentions that China and India reduced their poor populations with a “shift to outward-oriented trade policies and complementary reforms” as support for the existence of sweatshops. However, I think that those reforms and policies may have some complexities within them worth looking into, aside from resorting to child labor, which helped to support their country’s economy. As Satyarthi says in the interview piece, while it is true that a lone ban on importing sweatshop goods hurts poor countries, combining it with "follow-up action" like education assistance for children leaving the industry could pull, not just individuals, but a country out of poverty.