Hey, white people! Wanna help the poor? Then stop crying and buy a f*****g t-shirt.
Ugh, if you would like to read douchebag 23-year-old me blather on about sweatshops and stuff, feel free.
When workers voluntarily take a job they demonstrate that they believe the job is the best alternative available to them — even when that job is unsafe and the pay is very low compared to wages in the United States. That’s why economists with political views as divergent as Paul Krugman and Walter Williams have both written in defense of sweatshops… David Skarbek and I researched sweatshops that were documented in U.S. news sources… sweatshop worker earnings equaled or exceeded the average national income in 9 out of 11 countries we studied. Working in a sweatshop paid more than double the national average in four of the countries [emphasis added].
That’s from a guest poster on Bill Easterly’s excellent Aid Watch blog. Sweatshop labour conditions and wages are terrible compared to those in first-world countries, hence first-world guilt about their existence. But sweatshop labour conditions occur in poor countries, where the alternatives don’t include lavish unemployment benefits or the chance to go to grad school/avoid the real world for a little longer. Alternatives include, umm, stuff like starvation, disease and death.
Sweatshop work might be bad, especially if you’re accustomed to working in a plush office. But for the people who choose to work in sweatshops, they probably don’t see it that way. They probably see it something closer to this:
- Sweatshop = Job.
- Job = Wages.
- Wages = Food.
- Food TOTALLY EFFING PWNS Starvation.
If sweatshop wages are above the national average wages in these countries, it seems like sweatshop labour is a pretty good way to reduce poverty, no? So up to a point, it’d actually be great if there were more workers in sweatshops. But that’s only part of the story.
As poor countries become wealthier, and as factory production becomes more mechanised, new industries will come to the fore, and it will no longer be the case that sweatshop labour can pay double the national average wage. When that happens, people in those places will be able to move to higher-paying jobs with better conditions. But the employment and incomes generated by the factories are early and necessary steps on the poverty-reduction ladder. Cut out sweatshops without introducing a viable alternative, and poor countries go back down the ladder, not up. Show me a country that became rich without first being poor, and I’ll show you an idiot who doesn’t understand anything about development.
If you want to do something that might actually help people in developing countries, try these for a start:
1. Stop giving your money to “charities” whose chief outputs are teary-eyed white people and stereotypical images of flea-ridden Africans. In other words, stop giving your money to charities that you see on TV. You want help the poor by donating money. Instead of giving it to charities who’ll go and spend it on advertising how nice they (and you) are, why not give it to a micro-finance firm? That way, you could see your money put to good and productive use, by, y’know, actual people in developing countries?
2. Stop encouraging your governments to squander more money on massive, well-intentioned, high-falutin’, grossly ineffective, corrupt aid projects. At worst, development aid is a transfer of resources from rich first-world bureaucrats to rich third-world dictators. At best, it achieves a tiny proportion of its stated objectives at a massive overrun of original costs (read: it’s still corrupt). So yeah. Maybe not the best strategy. Don’t give them encouragement.
3. Buy more clothes from the Gap, or Primark, or H&M, or any place that sells clothes from countries whose names you can neither pronounce nor spell.
4. Find ways to support the labour movement(s) in developing countries. The real problem with sweatshops has nothing to do with the wages; it’s to do with the appalling working conditions in these places. Unions might distort labour markets, but they are also very effective at improving the conditions of employment for the working class. The working classes in rich countries are rich — I don’t give a fuck about them (and am glad that unions are in decline in Western countries). But in poor countries, organised labour still has an absolutely vital role to play in the economic development. In China, some workers are starting to take a stand for themselves. In lots of other places, this isn’t the case. We should want this to be the case for developing countries, even if it would mean slightly higher prices at Walmart and Old Navy. I think we’d survive having to pay $1 more for a 50kg sack of rice.
5. Lobby your government to reduce its immigration restrictions for third-world workers. If Guilty White Liberals (GWLs) were consistent in their thinking, they’d realise that the existence of terrible working and living conditions in poor countries is one of the most powerful arguments for open borders. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” — remember that one?
One final thought. Even in cultures where talking about money is considered impolite, people like to talk about how much they give to charity. But once they’ve given their money away, they don’t seem to be terribly interested in where that money goes, how it’s been allocated, and whether it reaches the people it was supposedly intended to help. On the flip side, critics of the aid process get a very hard time in the Western media, especially when they point out the obvious fact that trillions of dollars in aid money have had little positive impact for the poorest of the poor. Given these facts, it seems to me that what GWLs are actually buying with their charitable donations has nothing to do with improving the lives of the poor, and everything to do with a nice, warm, smug, self-satisfied feeling in their wuvvly wittle hearties. But as we good Hansonians know, charity isn’t about giving.
Originally published at crimesagainsthumility.tumblr.com.
