I was reading "Protest!(For no Good Reason) and got into a discussion with afriend of mine about it. That led me to the thought that:
“Those who disapprove of the conditions of sweatshops would do well to buy sweatshop shirts.”
I’ll explain my thought process soon, I have to leave where I am immediatly though.
My thought was that if they increase their demand for SS made shirts the price will rise and there will be higher profits. This would attract more producers and that would increase the demand for “sweat shop labor”. In order to keep workers in a factory (or to move them from one to another) higher wages/better conditions would have to be offered.
So if someone disapproves of “sweatshop” conditions they can either work to eliminate the jobs currently offered to the SS laborers, that is by not buying their clothes. That would certainly eliminate sweatshop labor…if not in the most humanitarian way. or they can make profitable the expansion of the industry so that competition will induce businesses to offer higher wages…seems a more humanitarian alternative.
I must say that thought seems either ill-developed or wrong, but I can’t quite tell. Any thoughts, preferably helping me make that point better or showing me how I’m wrong, would be appreciated.
That seems perfectly reasonable. The sweatshop is an option freely selected by the workers. As bad as it would seem, one has to therefore conclude that their other options were worse. Buying SS goods can only increase the options available to these people, as you say.
Most people who want to boycott sweatshop goods use language in a very imprecise way and end up feelling that the workers have no choice but to work in the sweat shop. But that is, of course, not true.
In terms of making the point with people who “argue” that way, sometimes it is good to bring the example back home, so to speak, and discuss an analogous situation that they can relate to directly. Then make the connection back to the sweat shop. People (especially those on the left) forget that choices and decisions are a common part of all humanity, whether they be in New York, or Bangladesh.
Wages in competitive markets tend to increase as profits increase. In most industries it means heavier investment in capital, and thus increasing worker productivity. I am not sure how sweatshops work in particular, but your idea might have some merit to it. One could argue that by continuing to finance sweatshops though one contributes to their continued profitability.
Totally agree with this. My views regarding sweatshops are simlar to my views regarding minimum wage. If workers judge the wages or conditions as being bad, then they can simply choose not to work there. If workers are making the choice to work in a “sweatshop” that means the option of not working is worse. I think a lot of people associate sweatshops with some form of slavery, which is simply false. Saying that you’re pro-sweatshops will raise some eyebrows from people who don’t understand basic free-market concepts.
Very well, but why do libertarians ignore the fact that sweatshops are not, in fact, paragons of the free market? Could they be? Sure, but empirically they tend not to be. Instead, American corporations pay off the government of a poor country, which then uses their military to secure some labor for the sweatshop. Employees who try to quit are violently put back to work. Am I in favor of allowing companies to operate shops with poor conditions and low pay? Absolutely. Am I in favor of intimidating people who want to quit, or using guns to force people to work there? You must be joking. At least as a first stage, the libertarian argument with college idealists ought to be carried out at the empirical level, to determine how sweatshops actually are operated. If the position most libertarians are assuming turns out to be correct - that sweatshop employees are there voluntarily and are not slaves, then give the idealist an opportunity to change his views. If he still maintains that they shouldn’t exist, then the argument becomes one over freedom vs. government control. As a part of the anti-war movement in college, I ended up working with a lot of lefties. I was ready to reject all their sweatshop blabbering, until I realized that they were not complaining about poor conditions or low pay, but about government collusion and force being used to obtain workers.