The Sweat of Nations

Sweatshops should be understood as a symptom of systemic economic problems. This is mentioned several times in the article analyzing media coverage of sweatshops. I’ll come back to this systemic nature. I’d like to address several of the arguments from Bhagwati’s piece. I intend to point out the flaws in these arguments and the way that they have been used throughout history and in the present day to justify oppression— like sweatshops.

            One of the things proposed by Bhagwati is that conditions for sweatshop workers are improving and can be improved more. I see this as analogous to slave owners who demonstrated that slaves are in a better condition now than 50 years ago, therefore slavery must be a good thing. Of course we know that it isn’t and it wouldn’t matter how good the conditions are getting until there is radical and revolutionary change in the system— in this case simply stop owning people. Another argument from Bhagwati is that things would get even worse for the sweatshop workers if we boycott and thus take away the incentive for sweatshops in the first place. I once again see an analogy to slavery, in which slave owners gave sophisticated arguments against freeing slaves. This included pointing out their homelessness, their lack of modern education and the notion that a slave gets better treatment than a worker (especially a black worker) because people take better care of their property than a rental. This has the same problem as the previous argument, trying to justify heinous human circumstances with ideas of inevitability and hopelessness.

My final problem with Bhagwati is the blatant neo-liberalism. “The most powerful policy instrument for removing poverty is growth” (Bhagwati). That is Bull Shit. Bhagwati’s faith in the market and modern economics has sunken him to disturbing depths. While the World Trade Organization would like us to believe that growth removes poverty, one need only look at the plethora of examples e.g. mexico, brazil, Latin America as a whole really and more. Economic growth may lead to some people reaching a higher living standard. Hell, for the sake of argument I’ll pretend that economic growth will definitely give everyone a higher standard of living, but that would not fix the exploitation involved in sweatshops or the failures of the market at large. To reiterate— even if economic growth made everyone’s lives better it would not fix the inequality, the exploitation and the depraved morality of sweatshops and wage-slavery. Interestingly enough I agree with Bhagwati, raising the wage for these workers won’t fix their problems, but I disagree because it is not going far enough to bring them economic equality and freedom. This is as opposed to Bhagwati who seems to think raising the wage is going to far, and would be hurtful. If we want to help sweatshop workers we need to look at how the economy works as a whole and find practical and radical evolution.