JOHN MILLER

 

 

The student-led antisweatshop movement that took hold on many college campuses during the late 1990s should have pleased economists. Studying the working conditions faced by factory workers across the globe offered powerful lessons about the workings of the world economy, the dimensions of world poverty, and most students' privileged position in that economy.

 

On top of that, these students were dedicated not just to explaining sweatshop conditions, but also to changing them. They wanted desperately to do something to put a stop to the brutalization and assaults on human dignity suffered by the women and men who made their jeans, t‑shirts, or sneakers. On many campuses, student activism succeeded in pressuring college administrators by demanding that clothing bearing their college logo not be made under sweatshop conditions, and, at best, that it be made by workers earning a living wage (Featherstone and United Students Against Sweatshops 2002).

 

But most mainstream economists were not at all pleased. No, they did not dispute these tales from the factory floor, many of which had been confirmed in the business press (Roberts and Bernstein 2000) and by international agencies (ILO 2000). Rather, mainstream economists rushed to defend the positive role of low wage factory jobs, the very kind we usually call sweatshops, in economic development and in alleviating poverty.

 

What is more, these economists were generally dismissive of the student‑led antisweatshop movement. In summer 2000, the Academic Consortium on International Trade (ACIT), a group of advocates of globalization and free trade made up mostly of economists, took it upon themselves to write directly to the presidents of universities and colleges (see wwwspp.umich.edu /rise / acit/). The ACIT letter warned presidents that antisweatshop protesters on college campuses were often ill informed and that adopting codes of conduct requiring multinational corporations to pay higher wages recommended by the protesters may cost workers in poor countries their jobs.

 

The response of mainstream economists to the antisweatshop movement was hardly surprising. Economists have a penchant for playing the contrarian, and, for the most part, they oppose interventions into market outcomes, even interventions into the labor markets of the developing world.

 

No matter how predictable, their response was profoundly disappointing. Although it contains elements of truth, what economists have to say about sweatshops misses the mark. That was my conclusion after spending summer and fall of 2000 reading much of what economists and economic journalists had written about sweatshops as I prepared to teach my undergraduate seminar, "Sweatshops and the Global Economy." First, the propositions that mainstream economists rely on to defend sweatshops are misleading, rooted in an exchange perspective that obscures sweatshop oppression. Sweatshop oppression is not defined by labor market exchanges but by the characteristics of a job. Second, policy positions based on these propositions are equally flawed. Economists' claim that market‑led economic development, independent of labor and social movements and government regulation, will put an end to sweatshop conditions distorts the historical record. Finally, their assertion that demands for better working conditions in the world‑export factories will harm third world workers and frustrate poverty alleviation is also suspect.

 

With that said, the challenge issued by mainstream economists to the antisweatshop movement remains a formidable one. What economists have to say about the sweatshops has considerable power in the way of persuasion and influence, the protestations of Bhagwati and the ACIT notwithstanding. Often it is their writings that are being distilled in what journalists, government officials, and the general public have to say about sweatshops.

 

Supporters of the antisweatshop movement, and instructors of sweatshop seminars, need to be able to answer each count of the economists' indictments of their movement with arguments that are equally persuasive.

 

Today a group of economists is dedicated to doing just that. In the fall of 2001, Scholars Against Sweatshop Labor (SASL) issued a response to the ACIT indictment of the antisweatshop movement (SASL 2001). Its lead author, economist Robert Pollin, made the case that "the anti­sweatshop movement is taking constructive steps toward improving living and working conditions for millions of poor people throughout the world."

 

Teaching about sweatshops also convinced me that supporters of the antisweatshop movement need to respond to the criticisms of mainstream economists with actions as well as words.

 

We need to link antisweatshop campaigns for the betterment of the women and men who toil in the world‑export factories with efforts to improve the lot of their brothers and sisters, who often work under even more oppressive conditions in the informal and agricultural sectors of the developing world.

 

Just Enforce the Law

 

What to do about sweatshops? That is not a difficult question for most mainstream economists to answer. Just enforce the law, they say (Weidenbaum 1999, 26‑28). And avoid other "institutional interventions" that might impair a market‑led development that will enhance productivity and thereby raise wages and improve working conditions (Irwin 2002,214; Sengenberger 1994, 10). By law, they mean local labor law, not some labor standard that ill-informed protesters (or even the International Labor Organization, for that matter) would impose on multinational corporations and their subcontractors in developing economies.

 

No one in the antisweatshop movement would quarrel with the insistence that the law be obeyed. In fact, several U.S. antisweatshop groups define a sweatshop in legal terms. According to Feminists Against Sweatshops (2002), for instance, sweatshop operators are employers who violate two or more labor laws, from the prohibition of child labor, to health, safety, fire, and building codes, to forced overtime and the minimum wage.

 

Effective enforcement of local labor law in the developing world, where labor legislation in many countries‑on paper,. at least‑is quite extensive, would surely help to combat sweatshop abuse as well (Portes 1994,163). For instance, Made in China, a report of the National Labor Committee, the leading U.S.‑based antisweatshop group, found that subcontractors producing goods for U.S. corporations, including Wal‑Mart and Nike, "routinely violate" Chinese labor law. In some of these factories, young women work as long as seventy hours a week and are paid just pennies an hour after pay deductions for board and room, clear violations of China's labor law (Kernaghan 2000). A three‑month Business Week investigation of the Chun Si Enterprise Handbag Factory in southern China, which makes Kathie Lee Gifford handbags sold by Wal‑Mart stores, confirmed that workers there confronted labor practices that included illegally collected fines, confiscated identity papers, and beatings (Roberts and Bernstein 2000).

 

But the limitations of this legal prescription for curing sweatshop abuse become obvious when we go to apply it to countries where local labor law, even on paper, does not measure up to the most minimal, internationally agreed‑upon labor standards. Take the case of the high-performance economies of Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. In those countries, several core labor conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO) have gone unratified‑including the right to organize. Minimum wages are well below the level necessary to lift a family of three above the poverty line, the usual definition of a living wage. And in those countries (as well as China), independent trade union activity is systematically and sometimes brutally suppressed.

 

When labor law protections are limited and international labor conventions are neither ratified nor respected, then insisting "the law should be fully obeyed" will do little to prevent sweatshop abuse. In those cases, enforcing the law would seem to be a shaky foundation on which to build a strategy of alleviating sweatshop labor through improved market outcomes.

 

If you are not convinced of the inadequacy of using local or existing labor law to detect sweatshop abuse, then try this exer­cise involving a famous U.S. workplace from the past. In February 2001, Rose Freedman, the last survivor of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, died at the age of 107 (Martin 2001). That horrific blaze killed 146 of her 500 coworkers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in lower Manhattan. Most of the victims were young women, some as young as thirteen years old (Kheel Center 1998, narrative 3). Many jumped to their death from the ninth‑story windows of the Triangle factory. A fire escape that led to nowhere and locked doors blocked their exit (Kheel Center 1998, narrative 3). Neither firefighters' Iladders nor the water from their hoses reached the factory on the upper floors of the modern Asch building, and their nets buckled under the weight of falling bodies (McClymer 1998, 133‑38).

 

These images shocked the nation. The Triangle fire led to a burst of city, state, and federal laws regulating the garment industry and dealing with workers' safety. For instance, by just two years later, the state of New York had passed into law eight new factory safety acts (McClymer 1998, 88). Following another burst of union organizing during the Great Depression, the legislation‑reform movement culminated in 1938 with the passage of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act under the Roosevelt administration.That act established the national minimum wage, required premium pay for overtime, and limited child labor.

 

Would enforcing existing labor law have been an adequate response to the worst industrial accident in the history of the United States? Triangle's co‑owners were tried on manslaughter charges. But they were acquitted because the jury could not establish if they had ordered the factory doors locked or had known about it, a practice Freedman claimed was routine. In a civil case, claims against the owner of the building were eventually settled for $75 per victim. Those rulings promised to do little to improve the tragic conditions of employment in the garment industry of 1911. Both historical and contemporary evidence, then, makes clear that simply enforcing labor law has not and will not ensure the safety of garment workers.

 

A Defense of Sweatshops?

 

The defense of sweatshops offered up by mainstream economists turns on two elegantly simple and ideologically powerful propositions. The first is that workers freely choose to enter these jobs, and the second is that these sweatshop jobs are better than the alternative employments available to them in developing economies. Both propositions have a certain truth to them.

 

An Exchange Perspective

 

From the perspective of mainstream economics, every exchange, including the exchange between worker and boss, is freely entered into and only takes place because both parties are made better off. Hiring workers to fill the jobs in the world‑export factories is no exception.

 

Of course, in some cases, workers do not freely enter into sweatshop employment even by the usual standards of wage labor. Sometimes workers are held captive. For example, a 1995 police raid of a fenced‑in compound of seven apartments in El Monte, California, found a clandestine garment sweatshop where some seventy‑two illegal Thai immigrants were held in virtual captivity as they sewed clothes for brand‑name labels (Su 1997, 143). Other times, workers find themselves locked into walled factory compounds surrounded by barbed wire, sometimes required to work fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, subject to physical abuse, and, after fines and charges are deducted from their paycheck, left without the money necessary to repay exorbitant hiring fees. That was the case for the more than 50,000 young female immigrants from China, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Thailand who were recently discovered in Saipan (part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a territory of the United States) working under these near‑slavelike conditions as they produced clothing for major American distributors bearing the label "Made in the United States" (ILO 2000).

 

But in most cases, workers do choose these jobs, if hardly freely or without the coercion of economic necessity. Seen from the exchange perspective of mainstream economics, that choice alone demonstrates that these factory job are neither sweatshops nor exploitative.

 

Listen to how mainstream economists and their followers make this argument. In response to the National Labor Committee's exposé of conditions in the Honduran factories manufacturing Kathie Lee clothing for Wal‑Mart, El Salvadoran economist Lucy Martinez‑Mont assured us that "People choose to work in maquila shops of their own free will, because those are the best jobs available to them" (Martinez‑Mont 1996, sec. A, p. 14). For economic journalist Nicholas Kristof (1998), the story of Mrs. Tratiwoon, an Indonesian woman, makes the same point. She sustains herself and her son by picking through a garbage dump outside of Jakarta in search of metal scraps to sell. She tells Kristof of her dreams for her three‑year‑old son as she works. "She wants him to grow up to work in a sweatshop."

 

Stories such as this one are powerful. The fact that many in the developing world are worse off than workers in the world‑export factories is a point that economists supportive of the antisweatshop movement do not deny. For instance, a few years back, economist Arthur MacEwan, my colleague at Dollars & Sense, a popular economics magazine, made much the same point. He observed that in a poor country like Indonesia, where women working in agriculture are paid wages one‑fifth those of women working in manufacturing, sweatshops do not seem to have a hard time finding workers (MacEwan 1998). And the Scholars Against Sweatshop Labor statement (2001) admits that "Even after allowing for the frequent low wages and poor working conditions in these jobs, they are still generally superior to 'informal' employment in, for example, much of agriculture or urban street vending."

 

This is not meant to suggest that these exchanges between employers and poor workers with few alternatives are in reality voluntary or that world‑export factory jobs are not sweatshops or places of exploitation. Rather, as political philosopher Michael Waltzer argues, these exchanges should be seen as "trades of last resort" or "desperate" exchanges that need to be protected by labor legislation regulating such things as limits on hours, a wage floor, and guaranteed health and safety requirements (Rodrik 1997, 35).

 

Prevailing Wages and Working Conditions

 

What mainstream economists say in defense of sweatshops is limited in other ways as well. For instance, an ACIT letter (2000) misstates the argument. The ACIT writes that multinational corporations "commonly pay their workers more on average in comparison to the prevailing market wage for similar workers employed elsewhere in the economy" But, as the SASL authors correctly point out, "While this is true, it does not speak to the situation in which most garments are produced throughout the world‑which is by firms subcontracted by multinational corporations, not the MNCs themselves." The ACIT authors implicitly acknowledge as much, for in the next sentence they write that, "in cases where subcontracting is involved, workers are generally paid no less than the prevailing market wage."

 

The SASL statement also warns that the ACIT claim that subcontractors pay the prevailing market wage does not by itself make a persuasive case that the world export factories we commonly call sweatshops are anything but that. The SASL authors (2001) emphasize that the prevailing market wage is frequently extremely low for garment workers in less developed countries. In addition, the recent university‑sponsored studies as well as an October 2000 report by the International Labor Organization consistently find that serious workplace abuses and violations of workers' rights are occurring in the garment industry throughout the world.

 

The same can be said about other world‑export factories. Consider for a minute the working conditions at the Indonesian factories that produce footwear for Reebok, the Stoughton, Massachusetts‑based international corporation that "goes to great lengths to portray itself as a conscientious promoter of human rights in the Third World" (Zuckoff 1994). Despite its status as a model employer, working conditions at factories that make Reebok footwear became the focus of the Boston Globe 1994 series entitled "Foul Trade" (Zuckoff 1994). The Globe tells the story of Yati, a young Indonesian woman in Tangerang, Indonesia. She works sewing bits of leather and lace for tennis shoes sold as Reeboks.

 

Yati sits at a sewing machine, which is one of sixty in her row. There are forty‑six rows on the factory floor. For working sixtythree hours a week, Yati earns not quite $80 a month‑just about the price of a pair of Reeboks in the United States. Her hourly pay is less than 32 cents per hour, which exceeds the minimum wage for her region of Indonesia. Yati lives in a nearby ten‑by twelve‑foot shack with no furniture. She and her two roommates sleep on the mud and tile floor.

 

A factory like the one Yati works in is typically owned by an East Asian company. For instance, PT Tong Yang Indonesia, a South Korean‑owned factory, pumped out 400,00 pairs of Reeboks a month in 1993. In return, Reebok paid its owner, Tan Chuan Cheng, $10.20 for each pair of shoes and then sold them for $60 or more in the United States. Most of Tan's payment went to purchase materials. Tan told the Globe that wages accounted for as little as $1.40 of the cost of a pair of shoes (Zuckoff 1994).

 

A More Effective Response

 

As I taught my seminar on sweatshops, I settled on a more effective response to the mainstream economic argument. It is simply this: Their argument is irrelevant for determining if a factory is a sweatshop or if workers are exploited. Sweatshop conditions are defined by the characteristics of a job. If workers are denied the right to organize, suffer unsafe and abusive working conditions, are forced to work overtime, or are paid less than a living wage, then they work in a sweatshop, regardless of how they came to take their jobs or if the alternatives they face are worse yet.

 

A careful reading of what the mainstream exchange perspective suggests about sweatshop jobs is not they are "good news" for the world's poor but "less bad news" than the usual conditions of work in the agricultural and informal sectors. The oppressive conditions of the work in the world‑export factories are not denied by their argument. For instance, ACIT leader Jagdish Bhagwati says sweatshop jobs are a "ticket to slightly less impoverishment" (Goldberg 2001, 30).

 

Consider again the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911. What should we say about the Triangle Shirtwaist Company? Was it a sweatshop, a site of exploitation of poor immigrant women? Looked at from this exchange perspective, the answers would seem to be no. "A garment factory in 1911 was pretty bad by today's standards, but not compared with alternates back then," economic historian Price Fishback told The New York Times (Tierney 1999). He says that, according to the data collected in 1908 by the United States Immigration Commission, garment workers' pay was 8 percent higher than the average of twentyone industries surveyed. Their wage nearly equaled that of American‑born workers, and was triple the typical wage in Italy or East Europe (Tierney 1999). At the time, even muckraking journalists allowed that the Triangle factory, lodged in a modern high‑rise building, was "safer than average" (McClymer 1998, 134‑38), and Triangle's workers readily admitted that its "steady employment" made them "eager to work for the company" (Kheel Center 1998, Letters, Newman).

 

But on that basis, are we really prepared to accept that employment in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, the site of the worst industrial fire in our history, was good news for the immigrant poor? After all, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was "in many ways a typical sweatshop" (Kheel Center 1998, narrative 2). Much of its work was overseen by subcontractors ‑sweaters who paid their women workers rock‑bottom wages and regularly fined them for lateness (McClymer 1998, 130). In addition, the wages of these Italian and Jewish immigrant women, whatever their level, were essential for the support of their families, according to the reports of Red Cross relief workers (McClymer 1998, 107‑9). Triangle's steady employment also came at a cost. During the busy season, workers were forced to endure fourteen‑hour days that lasted well into the evening (Kheel Center 1998, Letters, Newman). Finally, while the supposedly fireproof Asch building suffered little structural damage from the 1911 fire, it could not protect the women who worked in the Triangle factory (McClymer 1998, 86).

 

When measured against the safety standards imposed by the state of New York and the victories won for garment workers in the years immediately following the fire‑hardly an inappropriately ahistorical labor standard‑the working conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory are found wanting.

 

Confronting Critics of the Antisweatshop Movement

 

Still, none of the above speaks directly to the contention of mainstream economists that imposing "enlightened standards" advocated by the antisweatshop activists onto conditions for employment in the export factories of the developing world will immiserate the very workers the movement intends to help (ACIT '2000).

 

Core Labor Standards

 

To begin with, as labor economist Richard Freeman (1994, 80) writes, "Everyone, almost everyone is for some standards" (emphasis in the original). Surely that includes economists who would combat sweatshops by insisting that local labor law be respected. Even their position recognizes that the "voluntary" exchange of labor for wages must be delimited by rules, collectively determined and obeyed by all.

 

The relevant question is: What are those rules, and are any so basic that they should be applied universally, transcending the normal bounds of sovereignty? For the most part, economists, trained after all as economists and not political philosophers, have little to say on this matter other than to caution that outside of the condemnation of slavery, there is no universal agreement about the appropriateness of labor standards even when it comes to bonded labor and child labor (Bhagwati 1995, 754; Brown 2001, 94; Irwin 2002, 216).

 

Nonetheless other economists, even some critical of the antisweatshop movement, are favorably disposed toward international labor standards about safety and health, forced labor, and the right to organize. For instance, Alice Amsden, an economist who opposes establishing wage standards on developing economies, favors the imposition of other labor standards. "The issue," she says, "is not health and safety conditions, the right of workers to be treated like human beings‑not to be murdered for organizing unions, for example. These rights are inviolate" (Amsden 1995). At times, even Jagdish Bhagwati has taken a similar position (Bhagwati 2002, 60).

 

The International Labor Organization, in its 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles at Work, took a similar position. The ILO held that each of its 175 members (even if they have not ratified the conventions in question) was obligated "to respect, to promote and to realize" the fundamental rights of "freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining, the elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour, the effective abolition of child labour and the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation" (2002a).

 

The empirical evidence of the effect of these core labor standards on economic development is ambiguous. For instance, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that countries that strengthen these core labor standards "can increase economic growth and efficiency" (OECD 2000, 14). International trade economist Jai Mah, on the other hand, found that ratification of the ILO Conventions on freedom of association and on the right to nondiscrimination negatively affected the export performance of developing countries (Mah 1997, 781). And a study conducted by Dani Rodrik, another international trade economist, suggested that low core labor standards enhanced a country's comparative advantage in the production of labor‑intensive goods but deterred rather than attracted direct foreign investment (Rodrik 1996, 59).

 

The Living Wage

 

Nevertheless, almost all mainstream economists draw the line at labor codes designed to boost wages as opposed to leaving the determination of wages to labor market outcomes. That surely goes for labor codes that call for the payment of a living wage, usually defined as a wage adequate to lift a worker and two dependents out of poverty. The ACIT worries that if multinational corporations are persuaded to increase their wages (and those of their subcontractors) "in response to what the on‑going studies by the anti‑sweatshop movement may conclude are appropriate wage levels, the net result would be shifts in employments that will worsen the collective welfare of the very workers who are –supposed to be helped.” (2001). And ACIT leader Bhagwati dismisses the call for multinationals and their subcontractors to pay a living wage as so much first‑world protectionism cloaked in the language of "social responsibility" (Bhagwati 2000, 11). As he sees it, students' demand that a "living wage" be paid in developing countries would dull the one competitive advantage enjoyed by these countries, cheap labor.

 

But, in practice, would a labor standard demanding that multinational corporations and their subcontractors boost their wages beyond the local minimum wage and toward a living wage be a jobs killer? On that point the ACIT letter is silent, as journalists Featherstone and Henwood point out (2001a).

 

These economists may be short on evidence about the effects of higher wages on the demand for labor by multinational corporations and their subcontractors, but they are long on authority. Their proposition is as simple as this: "Either you believe labor demand curves are downward sloping, or you don't," as a neoclassical colleague said to me. Of course, not to believe that demand curves are negatively sloped would be tantamount to declaring yourself an economic illiterate.

 

Still, we can ask just how responsive are the hiring decisions of multinational corporations and their subcontractors to higher wages. There is real reason to believe that the right answer is, not very responsive.

 

Economists Robert Pollin, James Heintz, and Justine Burns recently looked more closely at this question (Pollin et al. 2001). They examined the impact that a 100 percent increase in the pay for apparel workers in Mexico and in the United States would have on costs relative to the retail price those garments sell for in the United States. Their preliminary findings are that doubling the pay of nonsupervisory workers would add just 50 cents to the production costs of a men's casual shirt sold for $32 in the United States, or just 1.6 percent of the retail price. And even if the wage increase were passed on to consumers, which seems likely because retailers in the U.S. garment industry enjoy substantial market power, Pollin et al. argue that the increase in price is well within the amount that recent surveys suggest U.S. consumers are willing to pay to purchase goods produced under "good" working conditions as opposed to sweatshop conditions. (See Elliot and Freeman [20001 for a detailed discussion of survey results.) More generally, using a sample of forty‑five countries over the period 1992‑97, Pollin et al. found no statistically significant relationship between real wages and employment growth in the apparel industry. Their results suggest that the mainstream economists' claim that improving the quality of jobs in the world export factories (by boosting wages) will reduce the number of jobs is not evident in the data (Pollin et al. 2001).

 

Even if this counterexample is not convincing, it is important to recall that the demand curve that defines the responsiveness of multinational corporations and their subcontractors to wage increases for factory workers is a theoretical device drawn while holding other economic circumstances constant, including public policy. In reality, those circumstances are neither fixed nor unalterable. In fact, to counteract any negative effect that higher wages might have on employment, the SASL statement calls for the adoption of new polices, which include measures to expand the overall number of relatively high quality jobs; relief from excessive foreign debt payments; raising worker job satisfaction and productivity and the quality of goods they produce; and improving the capacity to bring final products to retail markets. (SASL 2001)

 

"Shifting the demand curve for labor outward," says economic sociologist Peter Evans (2002), "is almost the definition of economic development‑making people more valuable relative to the commodities they need to live." This "high road" approach to development, adds Evans, has the additional benefit of augmenting the demand for the commodities that workers produce.

 

Historical Change and Social Improvement

 

A labor code that requires multinational corporations and their subcontractors to pay a living wage, provide safe and healthy working conditions, and allow workers to organize would be likely to have yet more profound effects on these developing economies. On this point, the antisweatshop activists and their critics agree. What they disagree about is whether these broader effects will be a help or hindrance to economic development and an improved standard of living in the developing world (Freeman 1992).

 

Mainstream critics argue that labor codes are likely to have widespread debilitating effects. The institutionalization of these labor standards proposed by activists, they argue, would derail a market‑led development process (Irwin 2002, 214; Sengenberger 1994, 10‑11).

 

As they see it, labor‑intensive sweatshops are good starter jobs‑the very jobs that successful developing economies and developed countries used as "stepping‑stones" to an improved standard of living for their citizens. And in each case, these countries outgrew their "sweatshop phase" through market‑led de­velopment that enhanced productivity, not through the interventions of an antisweatshop movement (Krugman 1994,116).

 

These economists often use the Asian economies as examples of national economies that abandoned "sweatshop practices" as they grew. Their list includes Japan, which moved from poverty to wealth early in the twentieth century, and the tiger economies‑South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan‑which grew rapidly in the second half of the century to become middleincome countries (Irwin 2002; Krugman 1994; Krugman 1997; Lim 1990; Weidenbaum 1999). Paul Krugman (1997) allows that some tigers relied on foreign plant owners (e.g., Singapore) while others shunned them (e.g., South Korea). Nonetheless, he maintains that their first stage of development had one constant: "It's always sweatshops" (Meyerson 1997).

 

For anyone who doubts that market‑led development that begins with a sweatshop phase produces intergenerational progress, Murray Weidenbaum (1999) invokes the personal story of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize‑winning economist. "If his parents were not willing to work so long and hard under sweatshop conditions, they could not have earned the money to invest in his education," writes Weidenbaum. "We should all be grateful for that investment by a previous generation of Friedmans and for the circumstances that enabled them to make that enlight­ened choice."

 

But these arguments distort the historical record and misrepresent how social improvement is brought about with economic development. First, the claim that developed economies passed through a sweatshop stage does not establish that sweatshops caused or contributed to the enhanced productivity that they say improved working conditions. Second, in the developed world, the sweatshop phase was not extinguished by marketled forces alone but when economic growth combined with the very kind of social action, or enlightened collective choice, that defenders of sweatshops find objectionable.

 

Even Nobel Prize‑winning economist Simon Kuznets, whose work did much to inspire economists' faith in the moderating effects of capitalist development on inequality, would find the mainstream economists' story of market‑led social progress questionable. Kuznets based his famous hypothesis‑that after initially increasing, inequality will diminish with capitalist economic development‑not on the operation of market forces alone, but on the combined effect of economic growth and social legislation. For instance, in his famous 1955 American Economic Re­view article, Kuznets writes,

 

In democratic societies the growing political power of the urban lowerincome groups led to a variety of protective and supporting legislation, much of it aimed to counteract the worst effects of rapid industrialization and urbanization and to support the claims of the broad masses for more adequate shares of the growing income of the country. (1955, 17)

 

The labor codes called for by the antisweatshop movement would seem to be an example of the "protective and supporting legislation" that Kuznets says is key to spreading the benefits of economic growth more widely.

 

To be sure, labor standards in the absence of economic growth will be hard put to make workers better off. Economist Ajit Singh and Ann Zammit of the South Centre, an intergovernmental organization dedicated to promoting cooperation among developing countries, make exactly this point in their article opposing compulsory labor standards (Singh and Zammit 2000, 37). As they note, over the last few decades, wages in rapidly growing South Korea increased much more quickly than those in slowly growing India, even though India had much better labor standards in the 1950s than South Korea did.

 

Even so, while economic growth might be necessary for the eradication of sweatshop abuse, it is not sufficient. U.S. economic history makes that clear. In the United States, the Shirtwaist strike of 1909, the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire two years later, and the hardships of the Great Depression inspired the unionization of garment workers and led to the imposition of government regulations on the garment industry and other industries, beginning with the New York Factory Acts and extending to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The power of those reforms along with the postwar boom nearly eradicated sweatshops in the United States.

 

Early in the postwar period, the incidence of sweatshop abuse had fallen such that International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) president David Dubinsky could claim in a speech that "we have wiped out the sweatshop" (Ross 2002). While no doubt a rhetorical embellishment, evidence suggests U.S. sweatshops had been in fact marginalized. "By the mid­1960s," reports Alan Howard of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), "more than one half of the workers in the U.S. apparel industry were organized and their real wages had been rising for decades" (Howard 1997, 155).

 

Since then, sweatshops have returned to the U.S. garment industry. The enforcement reports of the Department of Labor (DOL) confirm the high levels of labor violations in the garment industry. According to their garment‑enforcement reports, during fiscal year 2000 the department's Wage and Hour Division conducted a total of 434 investigations nationwide and found 217, or exactly half, of these contractors and manufacturers in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (DOL 2001). Using a definition of sweatshop developed by the General Accounting Office of the U.S. Congress‑‑a business that regularly violates both wage or child labor law and safety or health laws‑sociologist Robert Ross (2002) produced similar results. He estimates that just about 60 percent of the 960,000 apparel workers in the United States worked in sweatshop conditions in the late 1990s.

 

Why the return of the sweatshop? One of the chief reasons was that cutbacks in government programs left the Department of Labor ill‑equipped to enforce law. During the 1970s, under the Carter administration, the DOL had 1,600 wage‑and‑hour inspectors. That number was slashed to 700 under the Reagan administration. Even under the Clinton administration, it increased only to 942 in 1997 (Foo 1994). At the same time, the number of work sites to be patrolled by this dwindling force of investigators had nearly doubled.

 

The resurgence of sweatshops in the United States underlines the importance of political rules and enforcement and makes clear that "economic development" may increase overall income levels, but it will not by itself eliminate inhuman working conditions. In addition, the return of sweatshops casts doubt on the depiction of sweatshops as a stage that countries pass through just once, as their markets expand and productivity increases.

 

Finally, no matter how mistaken these mainstream economists might be about how societies have rid themselves of sweatshops, they are perhaps right that past economic developments have gone through a sweatshop stage. On that score, I would reply exactly as one well‑known economist did to a 1997 New York Times article that made the same point. His letter read this way:

 

Your June 22 Week in Review article on sweatshops quotes some prominent economists to the effect that sweatshops, which they confuse with "low‑wage factories," are "an essential first step toward modern prosperity in developing countries." Sweatshops indeed existed in 19thcentury Britain during early industrialization, leading to a burst of social legislation to rid the country of these ills. But nothing requires us to go that route again. Nations should join nongovernmental groups like the International Labor Organization to rid the world of sweatshops. In addition, we can require multinationals to apply our own labor, safety and environmental standards when they manufacture abroad. In Rome, they must do not as Romans do but as we do. Their example would spread.

 

Surprisingly, the author is none other than Jagdish Bhagwati (1997). I would only add to Bhagwati's powerful pre‑ACIT letter that the student‑led antisweatshop movement has increased the likelihood that future economic developments might avoid the sweatshop stage. Unlike earlier periods, when labor standards were imposed in response to the demands of labor organizations and an urban population of the developing world alone, first‑world consumers today are also pushing multinational corporations to improve the working conditions in the factories of their subcontractors (Brunett and Mahon 2001, 70).

 

Fastidiousness or Commodity Fetishism?

 

Mainstream economists have one last probing question for antisweatshop activists: Why factory workers?

 

Krugman (1997) asks the question in a most pointed way: "Why does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for 60 cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of 30 cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land, or of a Filipino scavenging on a garbage heap?"

 

It is a good question. There are plenty of poor people in the world. Some 1.2 billion people, about one‑fifth of the world population, had to make do on less than U.S.$1 a day in 1998 (World Bank 2001). The world's poor are disproportionately located in rural areas. Most scratch out their livelihood from subsistence agriculture or by plying petty trades, while others on the edge of urban centers work in the informal sector as street‑hawkers or the like (Todaro 2000, 151). In addition, if sweat is the issue, journalist Kristof (1998) assures us that "this kind of work, hoeing the field or working in paddies, often involves more perspiration than factory work."

 

So why has the plight of these rural workers, who are often poorer and sweat more than workers in the world‑export factories, not inspired a first‑world movement dedicated to their betterment?

 

"Fastidiousness" is Krugman's answer. "Unlike the starving subsistence farmer," says Krugman, "the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our benefit‑and this makes us feel unclean. And so there are self‑righteous demands for international labor standards" (1997; emphasis in the original).