Re: the whole sweatshop thing

[Don Smith <dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu>]

Hi, Peter,

This is such a thorny and knotty issue that I feel a little uncomfortable
discussing it in such an email forum as this, where subtleties and connotations
can be so easily lost or misconstrued.  I'm hardly an expert and can only react
to what I've read.  First of all, let me address your concern about the
politicizing of the word "sweatshop" and limit my comments to *just* the tax
haven EPZs.  What it comes down to for me is this: "better than the
alternative", even if it is true, is not good enough.  It does not seem right
to me that a company can spend millions of dollars for a celebrity to appear in
their commercial, but won't spend the thousands it would take for the people
who actually make their products to live humanely.  

You wrote: "then clearly, they are working at the so-called sweat-shop because
they can't find better work anywhere else -- and is that really the company's
fault?"  I don't think that is anywhere near clear.  First of all, you are
assuming that these people are cognizant of all the choices available to them,
and are able to act on those options, which from what I've read is often not
the case.  It also assumes that those choices can be made in a pressure-free
environment, which is often not the case, given the realities of government
corruption and military power.  If your traditional livelihood is farming, but
Shell Oil has polluted your family's land to the point where it can't sustain
life, and if you complain to the government about it, you get killed because
they don't want to lose the lucrative Shell contracts (same with Chevron), is
it really fair to ask "is it the company's fault?" that you don't have other
options than cheap manufacturing labor, as if these things are completely
unrelated to each other?  If the lucrative contracts weren't going to support
corrupt governemts like in Burma or Columbia (where government death squads
have killed workers trying to unionize in Coca-cola factories), maybe the
people could get real land reform and start finding better options for
themselves.  I think that article, as written, is totally making a post-hoc-
propter-hoc argument with respect to the prosperities of various Asian
countries.  It may well be true, but the conclusion is *not* justified by the
data they give in the article.

My thoughts are rushing much much faster than I can type over this ISDN line
from the mountaintop in Australia, so I will just leave it with this: whatever
the convoluted economic and political theories and statistics might be to argue
this way or that on the issue, for me the basic issue is very simple: do unto
others as you would have done unto you.  I would not want to be treated as
those people are treated.  I can't say "well, yes, they house workers in
firetraps, expose children to dangerous chemicals, deny bathroom breaks, demand
sexual favors, force people to work double shifts or dismiss anyone who tries
to organize a union... *but*..."  there is no "but" that can justify that list.
Whether it's better to buy fewer products from such places or more I do not
know, but I simply cannot rationalize the status quo.

And that's enough from me on that, I think...
-- 
Don Smith                           Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                                 http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
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