Why sweatshops are wrong

The pay? Sometimes less than 20 cents per day or about one cent per hour. Products produced in sweatshops Products that are commonly produced in sweatshops include clothing, shoes, toys, electronics, carpets, chocolate, coffee. What to do as a consumer to avoid supporting sweatshops? So why no major changes if people are willing to pay more to avoid sweatshops? See more. Sweatshop workers are extremely low-paid War on want: Sweatshops in Bangladesh.

Support TheWorldCounts Spread the message. Visit our Shop Make a Donation. Sustainable Shopping. Made Simple. Easily browse thousands of verified sustainable products. Anti-sweatshop advocates go further to say that beyond following the letter of the law which can be very weak in many countries that attract sweatshops , a factory must pay a living wage in safe working conditions, enforce reasonable work hours, provide for sick leave and maternity leave, and allow workers to organize to avoid being labeled a sweatshop.

As global manufacturing costs continued to shift, many companies then moved their operations from Mexico to even more attractive Asian countries. And more recently still, after the US-Jordan Free Trade agreement went into effect in , the number of sweatshops in that country exploded as well. Between and , apparel exports from Jordan to the US soared percent, often due to the round-the-clock labor of guest workers from poor Asian countries who were following the jobs as they moved.

A: No. No one should have to work hour days just so Americans can save a few dollars on clothes. Sweatshop workers are trapped in a cycle of exploitation that rarely improves their economic situation. Consider the example cited in a National Labor Committee report on a Honduran worker sewing clothing for Wal-Mart at a rate of 43 cents an hour.

After spending money on daily meals and transportation to work, the average worker is left with around 80 cents per day for rent, bills, child care, school costs, medicines, emergencies, and other expenses. The US Department of Labor regularly uncovers sweatshop abuse in American factories, which are often contracted to make fast fashion clothing for American brands. Given the problematic aspects of both kinds of views commonly defended, I think the right view is that companies that are able to are morally obligated to hire from among the global poor and to offer jobs at better wages, in better working conditions and perhaps for fewer hours than are typical of sweatshops.

Why should we find this view plausible? First, the companies that I have in mind control vast resources and can have a large impact on the opportunities available to millions of badly off people around the world. As a general matter, the ability to help is an important determinant of which agents are obligated to benefit those in need.

Second, choices like those faced by companies deciding where to locate production are, at least in part, choices about which among multiple groups of potential workers to benefit. Conceived of in this broadly distributive way, all of the morally relevant factors suggest that locating a site in the developed world is not the best option.

Indeed, in many circumstances it would count as the worst option, morally speaking. Furthermore, many philosophers have argued that we should generally prioritize those who are worse off over those who are better off. Finally, and perhaps most powerfully, there are strong reasons to think that impoverished potential sweatshop workers are victims of both domestic and global structural injustices, from which wealthy corporations typically benefit.

And since corporations typically locate production sites in poor countries because it will increase their profits, it seems clear that at least in cases in which keeping production in the developed world is a viable option, companies could accept lower than maximum profits and use the additional income to, for example, increase the wages of sweatshop workers above the locally prevailing level and improve workplace safety conditions.

This is the only kind of view that unconditionally requires that companies consider the interests of the global poor in a serious way in their business decision-making.

Therefore, a fairly radical shift in our thinking about the ethics of employment and the appropriate role of corporations in the global economy is necessary. If we want to be able to plausibly claim that our thinking about these issues is consistent with a serious concern for the lives of people like Qaifa, who live in conditions such that they would accept sweatshop work if it was offered to them and be better off for it, we must, in my view, make this shift. A potentially useful way of beginning to assess whether any particular company is obligated to do more than it is in fact doing is to look at its profit margins, as well as salaries of high-level employees, and consider whether redirecting at least some resources in ways that would benefit sweatshop workers in its supply chain would be feasible.

In many cases I suspect the answer will be that such redirection of resources would be possible. On the other hand, at least some evidence that a company is satisfying its obligations would be provided by a combination of lower than average profit margins and a practice of ensuring that even the lowest level workers in its supply chain are paid a living wage.

I am grateful to anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to consider how we might attempt to assess whether companies are complying with the obligations that I defend.

See, for example, Singer , Unger , and Murphy Even those who think that factors in addition to capacity to help play a significant role in determining which agents are obligated to contribute to benefiting those in need, and how extensive their obligations are, tend to think that capacity to help is among the relevant factors.

See, for example, Miller Defenders of the view that it is permissible for firms to employ workers in sweatshop conditions often appeal to the long-term benefits to both sweatshop workers and the communities in which sweatshops are located in order to support their view; see, for example, Maitland As Chris Meyers points out, however, the evidence that introducing sweatshops into a country or community will have substantially beneficial long-term effects is mixed at best , p.

However, since I am arguing that MNCs can be obligated to locate new employment opportunities in impoverished countries and provide benefits that exceed those provided by sweatshop jobs alone , by, for example, offering conditions of employment that are intuitively non-exploitative, there is, it seems to me, significantly less reason to be concerned that the new employment opportunities that would be provided if companies like M followed my recommendations would not significantly benefit both the workers and the broader communities in which they live.

For a powerful defense of the view that beneficiaries of global structural injustice have potentially extensive obligations to benefit those who are disadvantaged by such injustice, see Ashford Other sympathetic discussions include Woodruff , McMahan , and Hill I defend a version of the view, with particular application to duties to contribute to addressing the threat of climate change, in Berkey In particular, it is plausible that they ought to aim to ensure, as much as possible, that workers in their supply chains are paid living wages, that safety-related risks are kept reasonably limited, and that mandatory work hours are at least not unreasonably long.

And, as I have noted, she holds that a wide range of agents have political responsibilities to contribute to addressing the structural injustices that make employing people in sweatshop conditions both possible and potentially difficult to avoid. This is especially true if we think that agents that have direct responsibility for an objectionable state of affairs have, all else equal, stronger obligations to contribute to remedying them.

It is not obvious, however, that Young is herself committed to such a view. Indeed, as an anonymous reviewer suggests, her account of political responsibility can plausibly be interpreted as implying positive duties to the global poor of at least roughly the same kind that I defend. One of the most important features of my view, however, is that the content of these positive duties is to do whatever will best contribute to improving the conditions of the global poor, whether that involves attempting to reform structural conditions, providing higher wages and better working conditions, some combination of these things, or, in principle, anything else that would benefit those to whom the duties are owed.

I see no principled reason for accepting this limitation. This is the case on any view on which firms have a conditional obligation to, for example, pay workers a living wage, or provide workplace safety conditions that meet a standard of adequacy e. On views with this structure, firms are under no obligation to hire or otherwise benefit impoverished people in developing countries; but if they do hire them, they are obligated to provide either a living wage if possible , or a fair wage, where the standards for fairness are determined by an independent account that might be maximally favorable to workers Kates Arneson, R.

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