National Review - April 2, 2001
Sweatshop Chic: The know-nothings find a cause By Jonah Goldberg
The lefty ideal used to be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." But with the end of the Cold War, pragmatism has conquered, and the goal is now slightly less ambitious: to make labor "sweat-free." Work's okay, but sweaty work-forget it.
The anti-sweatshop movement has a lot riding on it. Everyone from Noam Chomsky to John Sweeney thinks it could form the basis for a new Left-progressive united front. Currently the coalition is driven by students, funded by unions, and cheered on by a very broad assortment of liberals.
And once you start reading the anti-sweatshop "literature," it's easy to see why the cause is so fashionable. Sweatshops are seen as spores of capitalism and Western imperialism, floating on the international trade winds, setting roots in virgin territories, and mushrooming into everything Mother Jones readers deplore: the oppression of women and minorities, exploitation of the poor, and destruction of the environment. What could be more useful for recharging the batteries of dour feminists and moth-balled Marxists?
In the U.S., it all got started in earnest in 1997, when a bunch of kids at Duke University were determined to make sure that no Blue Devil sweatshirts or beer cozies were made by poor people or the children of poor people. So they had a sit-in. The school administration (surprise!) caved, agreeing to require that school licensees sign a "code of conduct" permitting only "sweat-free" sweatshirts.
Since then, the movement has grown to more than 100 campuses and is already of a scale comparable to the South African "divestiture" movement on campuses in the 1980s. Indeed, "sweatshop" has replaced "children" as the new Swiss Army all-purpose word for the Left. In the past, any cause-gun control, welfare, Head Start, the designated-hitter rule- became immediately sacrosanct if you just rubbed it with a kid. Now "sweatshop" has a similar elastic utility. "Sweatshops are more than just labor abuse," explains Sweatshops.org, a web clearinghouse for the sweat-free movement. "When you find a sweatshop you'll also find social injustice, poverty, discrimination, abuse of women and environmental damage." In other words, everyone in the coalition of the oppressed can get a treat by whacking this pinata.
As Walter Olson of the of the Manhattan Institute has catalogued, just about anything can be called a sweatshop now. In 1999, AFL-CIO executive vice-president Linda Chavez-Thompson received raucous applause from marchers when she declared that Yale University was a "sweatshop"-because it refused to permit its "exploited" grad students to unionize. (They get paid close to $40,000 at an annualized rate, plus free tuition and health insurance.) Time magazine called the dot-com companies a "a piecework-industry sweatshop." Dan Stein, head of the anti-immigration group FAIR, declared that a bill granting more U.S. visas to high-skilled computer programmers and engineers "should rightly be called the Silicon Valley Sweatshop Act." (In 1998, salaries for software engineers started at $50,000 a year; hardly something for Upton Sinclair to break his pencil about.)
The real villains, of course, are the Third World enterprises where poor people work long hours in unpleasant circumstances for less than a dollar an hour. No one should defend the horrors-factories with locked doors during fires, employers who confiscate passports and harass workers, etc.-but the fact remains that, on the whole, what most opponents call "sweatshops" are actually a good thing.
A recent Lingua Franca cover story surveyed the current state of the academic debate over sweatshops, and found that even the most rabid critics are forced to concede that the evil multinationals generally pay at least the prevailing wage in the countries in which they operate, and, more often than not, more. Most of the "exploitees" are happy to get these jobs because, as Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati put it, they're a "ticket to slightly less impoverishment."
Not surprisingly, this sort of pragmatism can drive a gender theorist to the point of kicking over her fern. What about the oppression? What about the racism? What about my grant to study homophobia in Indonesian sneaker factories? Indeed, most academics in the anti-sweatshop movement are cultural-studies types whose chief interest is finding new cudgels against whitey.
The broad economic consensus reaches from Bhagwati and Milton Friedman all the way over to stalwart liberals like Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman: Sweatshops, all in all, equal progress. Economic development makes people less poor, which means healthier, freer, and more capable of protecting the environment and workers' rights. All of the Asian economic powers began with sweaty labor, which generated the resources to create a less sweaty economy. Krugman points out, for example, that in 1975 South Korean wages equaled only 5 percent of U.S. wages; two decades later, they had risen to 43 percent.
A handful of economists dismiss this consensus, saying their colleagues aren't asking the right questions. Jeffrey Winters, a professor of political economy at Northwestern University, suggests that we should be asking, "How do wages compare with those of CEOs and celebrity endorsers?" The bottom line, Winters tells Lingua Franca, is that "Nike does not pay a living wage and could easily afford to."
The anti-imperialists are, themselves, being rather imperialistic. For someone to ask, "What would Heidegger say about Bangladeshi piecework?" is an example of Western bias; but so is asking whether a Vietnamese worker at a Nike plant is making a large enough fraction of Michael Jordan's salary. In neither case does the question represent a truly "indigenous" way of looking at the issue. Income inequality is something that particularly offends Western sensibilities.
Winters asks, "Should American students be any less outraged just because Nike positions itself slightly higher than some of the exceptionally bad local Indonesian or Vietnamese producers?" The answer, of course, is yes-they should be less outraged, though they can still be angry. If Nike is raising the standard of living and bringing thousands of jobs that wouldn't otherwise be available to a poor country, then maybe outrage isn't the right response. As Linda Lim, a professor at the University of Michigan and a critic of the sweat-free cause, told Lingua Franca, this is "patronizing white-man's-burden stuff."
To the anti-sweat ideologues, Western-style capitalism is an unnatural imposition of alien values on foreign cultures, but somehow the imposition of equally Western concepts of fair labor practices and just compensation are wholly consistent with these cultures. Take child labor: It may be horrifying to Americans who treat their progeny as opportunities to display conspicuous consumption, but in much of the Third World, it is natural to view your child as an economic asset. In countries where schools are not available or affordable, it would be limousine liberalism on a global scale to insist that children stay home and consume resources-which is why even the U.N. and most non-government organizations oppose an outright ban on child labor.
What the anti-sweatshop movement amounts to is a war on development. And while the motives of the students who form the backbone of the movement are surely decent, the intentions of their backers are less so. The United Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees, a member of the AFL-CIO, has seen its membership plummet by nearly two-thirds over the last few decades largely because garment-industry jobs have gone overseas. Its effort to ban the importation of whatever it claims to be sweatshop products is directly, and often shamelessly, tied to a protectionist desire to keep out cheaper products and save union jobs.
Sweatshops are not an end in themselves, but the first rung on the ladder of success; rather than hurry nations up that ladder, radicals would keep these nations frozen in amber-living museums of poverty and ignorance. The best evidence that sweatshops are transitory in nature can be found right here at home, where the anti-sweatshop movement began with the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911. Sweatshops helped move millions of unskilled immigrants out of poverty. While the fire helped galvanize reformers to curb many of the excesses of the garment industry, it was the success of the industry itself that made such efforts affordable.
Rose Freedman, the last survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, died in February at the age of 107. Mrs. Freedman, a tireless advocate for labor reforms, was a remarkable woman who saw a lot in her lifetime. But what was barely mentioned in her obituaries was that she lived to see her granddaughter become the president of 20th Century Fox Television.
If that's the kind of intractable intergenerational poverty that sweatshops propagate, then the rest of the world needs more of them.