I had a somewhat interesting exchange at Carole Minjares’ Missoulapolis yesterday with a gentleman calling himself “Max Bucks”. It happens down in the comments. I note that
Minimum wage prevents sweatshops. Look down at your feet, check out the location of the manufacturer of your sneaker, and then check out Global Exchange to find out if that company uses sweatshops to produce the product. Usually they do.
That’s a result of free markets – that’s how they work. Slaves of old had food and shelter. That’s all sweatshop workers get. What’s different? A rose by any other name…
To which comes the reply:
…you say, “Minimum wage prevents sweatshops.” You have no proof of that. In fact, the term “sweatshop” has no absolute meaning whatsoever. It is just a buzzword you picked up somewhere.
It follows … if one believes that markets inevitably lead to better lives, one has to internalize contradictions when evidence doesn’t support the theory. Therefore it would make sense that a conservative would conclude either that sweatshops don’t exist, or that they lead to better lives. Max chooses the former route.
I didn’t have to look far to find the second assertion, that they actually make lives better. Here’s a piece, written by “Jimmie” at a blog called “The Sundries Shack” that spells it out pretty clearly:
The workers can actually sell their services, just like we do here all the time, to the companies that pay better and offer better conditions. Competition between companies is causing conditions to improve regularly. Without those sweatshops, workers have few other options.
Throw in a little garbled U.S. history, and the circle is complete:
Sweatshops exist in third-world countries just like they existed here. They will change just like they changed here, so long as we don’t interfere with the normal progress of the free market. We can help these countries a lot just by opening our markets to them.
The real world is a little uglier than that. If it were a perfect world (and it damn near is), manufacturers would be free to roam the globe looking for the ideal conditions in which to make their products. For instance, during the 1970’s, Nike had its shoes made in South Korea and Taiwan. But the climate changed, workers began to organize and wages began to go up. Nike moved on, to Indonesia, China, and Vietnam–countries where protective labor laws are poorly enforced and cheap labor is abundant. In China and Vietnam, trade unions are illegal.
Working conditions did not naturally improve in Taiwan and South Korea – workers rebelled, fought free market forces, and Nike fled – to places where government protects them from such natural uprisings. But hey – if labor organizing can be classified as a market force, then Jimmie has it right – things do get better. But conservatives uniformly hate unions, and support laws that make organization hard, if not impossible. They must hate market forces. They fight them in order to keep wages down.
Jimmie offers up more justification:
It’s not respectful to workers to force them into the streets as hookers or to take away the best and safest means they’ve ever seen seen to earn themselves a basic living.
This goes to the heart of right wing thought – people always pursue comparative advantage. They work in sweatshops because the alternatives are worse. Therefore, sweatshops offer a healthy comparative advantage. Therefore, sweatshops are a positive market force, and should be left alone.
Therefore, we progressives, in our efforts to curtail and eliminate sweatshops, are harming people.
Jimmie says that free markets in the U.S. eventually eliminated the sweatshop. Never mind that it still exists in our inner cities and produce fields, what progress we have had came about because people organized and fought for laws to curtail the free market and to protect workers.
The conundrum the right wing faces with sweatshops takes a fine lick of self-serving logic to overcome, but overcome it they do thanks to free market logic. Free markets are always good >> free markets give us sweatshops >> sweatshops are a good thing.
So we must live with sweatshops. End of right wing econ 101. Thanks for the lesson, Jimmie, and Max.
Piece of Mindful 
That’s actually not my point at all. I suspect that you misread my post to get to the conclusion you wanted.
There is no question that closing sweatshops in third-world countries is bad for the workers there. Taking away their most lucrative and safest work option is harmful. That is what the left inevitably does because they insist on nothing whatsoever to replace them. Instead of railing against sweatshops alone, perhaps you should try helping those countries open up their economies so that more options for workers can come in? How about helping the workers realize their value by giving them more opportunities to shop their labor skills to more employers?
Instead, I suspect, you’re content to simply close the sweatshop and walk away with a nice warm glow of satisfaction. Meanwhile, the women you just put out of work are likely to end up with starving children and a life of prostitution. Well done.
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Free trade among relatively equal countries leads to positive results, but among unequals inevitably leads to a lowering of wages in the more advanced country, and sweatshops in the undeveloped one. It’s nothing more than manufacturers pursuing comparative advantage. Workers get the burning end of that stick.
Outfits fighting on the progressive front are pursuing improvement of conditions in sweatshops (not closing them, but instead demanding better conditions and labor rights). You need to look into that a little further. For your side, manufacturers inevitably flee when workers demand better conditions, negating your premise that free markets make lives better.
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Nice post. A couple thoughts:
–These sweatshop advocates often ignore the real conditions at these factories. They’re not “better” than the alternative; many times the sweatshops are prisons, where workers are locked up at night and aren’t allowed to leave. In the Marianas Islands, for example, young women were lured to the factories on false promises and then forced to work in company brothels.
–But it’s true that the presence of corporate sweatshops improve conditions. That’s because workers, reacting against the multinationals’ form of capitalism, demand improvements in working and environmental conditions. Corporate capitalism doesn’t bring improvements; improvements are won in backlash against these corporations.
The progressives’ cure is fair trade. Make trade agreements that require minimum standards in working conditions, environmental regulations, and pay scales in the countries we do business with. That’ll make the market more competitive, give US industry a chance, and bring real improvements abroad.
The current “free” trade agreements are structured to ensure that the profits of giant, centralized multinational corporations are maximized.
It’s a mystery to me why conservatives always talk up the market as a dynamic force for good, when they constantly seek to undermine it by supporting the policies that give advantages to behemoth entities like multinationals. The rise of corporations has ushered in an era of centralized, national and international planned economies to the detriment of consumers, the free market, and innovation.
Go figure.
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I know I’m weighing in a little late – but I find the ‘free-market’ argument compelling in theory, but hurting in practice. I agree that the most important work should be to improve countries’ overall economic condition, but that takes years and hundreds of dedicated workers in collaboration. Consumers can also signal change – I think that if the major corporations come back to the mainland because of consumer demand, then positive economic changes might be made in the other countries to attract the companies by creating more labor friendly laws.
Anyone else that thinks so – or still wants to voice an opinion: http://www.thepoint.com/campaigns/nike-reebok-puma-somebody-please-stop-using-sweat-shops-and-well-totally-buy-your-shoes
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