Thoughts on Sweatshops

“Justice isn’t just for those who got dough”. This a quote I recently heard from a spoken word piece by Boonaa Mohammed. This really applies to children who are forced into child labor with extreme conditions and are being oppressed through taking away rights to a future. I think everyone would agree the industry feels like it has a right to the future and thus thinks that it should be able to grow and expand. In a similar way, since the value of a human being is should simply not be based on the monetary wealth a person holds, a child has a right to a future. Industries can improve on their way of dealing with child labor by respecting this idea by simply respecting the child’s future. This does not necessarily cause a detrimental harm to their future. One way to do that would be to allow an opportunity for education and really valuing the work that children may do for the industry. The value can be given holding respect for the child’s current state and future. In the case of many industries that have child labor “children are nameless, faceless, voiceless non-entities. They have no education or health care” (Satyarthi 2). According to utilitarian ideology, arguments could be against sweatshops because you take away justice from those who are poor (and in the case of Bangladesh, this population is supersedes those who are affluent), and are causing a suffering that is beyond comparable. If you would want to quantify things, the quantity of suffering the industry will have to face if work hours were decreased and children were given education is only a monetary suffering.  The suffering of the children who go through work that causes physical, emotional, and psychological pain has more weight. In this way the industry ought to change its practices in order to decrease that suffering. The solution to this problem is multidimensional, and cannot be changed in drastic ways which why I say that the first step should be to better the conditions of the labor.