attacks on the left like this cheer me up. Puts a spring in my step.
>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.
on the whole...
"what most opponents call 'sweatshops'" and what some opponents call, um, factories? What?
>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.
[As Austin Power's Dr. Evil sez, right...]
>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."
well?
>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.
rather imperialistic statement
>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.
Howbout anger?
>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.
buy American!
>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.
we need more fires to galvanize reformers
>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.
No doubt fuckers like Jonah Goldberg were berating Freedman way back when, telling her the so-called reforms she was advocating would only impede progress