But typically it does, hence why workers keep showing up for work. Unfortunately, most campaigns in Britain seem to be straightforwardly anti-sweatshop. So how can we help those employed in sweatshops? Sweatshops is a source of employment, opportunity to improve lifestyle and it helps developing countries to improve their situations.
It is understandable that anti-poverty campaigners find sweatshops appalling, and work done to improve conditions in sweatshops might be valuable, but too often people forget that blunt campaigns against sweatshops probably end up hurting people.
Buy the product and you incentivize the harm. Surely the same sad logic applies: if companies are pressured to improve pay and conditions in developing countries then they will simply close down their factories and move back to developed countries.
Last but not the least, sweatshops can be expanding a country economy too. And what do workers themselves think of sweatshops, given not just wages but other non-monetary compensation as well?
The International Labour Organisation estimates that agricultural workers suffer million accidents every year, and say that in some countries the fatal accident rate is twice as common in agriculture as in other industries.
In fact, benefiting while wronging is exactly what exploitation is all about. One option might be guest worker programmestargeted at people from the poorest countries in the world, to allow them to come and work in the developed world so that they can send more money back home for investment.
They are not a good option, but they are the least bad option currently available to many people. It will remain, however, the lowest minimum wage in world. Instead, people should use the awfulness of sweatshops — and even greater awfulness of other jobs — as proof that we need to do more, much more, to give better options to poor people in other countries.