Sweatshops: Social Justice and the Demand for Cheap Goods - Case Study Example

Sweatshops: Social Justice and the Demand for Cheap Goods Sixteen hours a day, six days a week, you work in a garment factory in India to sew clothing for Gap Corporation. You eat mosquito-covered rice, twice a day if you are lucky, and use an outdoor latrine overflowing with the waste of your fellow workers. A rubber pipe reminds you to work faster. Cry over your conditions and an oily cloth is stuffed in your mouth. And you are only ten years old. This story is not from some sordid Charles Dickens’ novel. It happened to real children in the bright and shining economy of 2006 (Ehrenreich, 2008). Sweatshop conditions are not always as horrendous as those depicted in this story, but in a relative way, garment manufacturing offends every American sensibility except the quest for “cheap.” The American consumer demands cheap products, and the first part of this essay shows how multinational corporations such as Wal-Mart and Nike work hard to comply. The second part of the essay attempts a balanced look at sweatshops: the argument that “good sweatshops” aren’t so bad, and have benefits for workers and consumers. Finally, section three begins to show how the American consumer must learn to deal with the morality of sweatshops, because as long as we demand cheap goods, they will be manufactured using the cheapest labor possible. To set the scene, as quoted in North and Smietana (2008), Sweatshop Watch defines a sweatshop as a workplace where workers are subject to: Extreme exploitation both in wages and hours; Health and safety hazards; Verbal and physical abuse disguised as discipline, and/or sexual exploitation; and Intimidation should they try to organize or speak out. To the American mind, all overseas garment manufacturers meet these criteria, but that is relative to the way we think about the issue, not how they think about the issue. The Insatiable Consumer Appetite The American consumer is a funny animal. We demand conflicting things of the goods we buy: they must be high-quality in materials and workmanship, and they must be cheap. We’ll settle for the cheap in most cases, without giving a thought as to why the goods are so cheap. We complain about shelling out $60 for a pair of jeans, whine about credit card interest rates, and put that pair of jeans in a drawer with a dozen other pairs. The only time we read the tag is to find out the washing instructions. Yet we are (briefly) outraged when our big box stores are ferreted out by activists and accused of employing sweatshop workers. It is quite terrible that garment workers in Bangladesh sew Wal-Mart’s clothing 19 hours a day for less than $20 USD a month (Gogoi, 2008). After all, the federal minimum wage in Bangladesh is $24 USD a month! As a result of this report, Wal-Mart sent a team of concerned employees unannounced to that particular factory to ascertain conditions, and “proposed using an independent third party to work with factory management to monitor factory operations” (5). Wal-Mart did not say We will not buy from this factory until change happens. They did not say We are actually going to do something. They did say they would look into it, and the concerned citizens group that blew the whistle commented, “If [Wal-Mart] takes a leadership position…there is no question that it can really have an impact” (5). Everybody feels good! A cynic might interpret these actions and reactions as more of the same: no real change will happen for the garment workers in Bangladesh, except they will probably receive a raise of $4 a month. A former sweatshop inspector tells the powerful story of “corporate social responsibility monitoring” (Frank, 2008, p. 34), which is what Wal-Mart officials were talking about when they said they would hire a third party to investigate the factory in Bangladesh. “Ethical sourcing” and “compliance programs” are corporate-speak for “looking into it.” Frank comments that codes of labor standards can give factory workers in third-world countries some relief. How much relief, he goes on to say, depends greatly on the willingness of the factory supervisors and the employees to speak to inspectors honestly, and not hide pregnant workers on the roof during inspections, for instance. Frank notes that retailers may dislike the results of inspections and the fact that the particular factory will not change its ways; might sever the relationship with that factory; and might move on to another. Always in search of the cheap, large retailers such as Wal-Mart can afford to dictate conditions as long as it serves the bottom line. Moving from one supplier to the next in quick succession does not bring about transformational change; working in partnership with foreign factories and publishing the real results of inspections can make a difference (Frank, 2008; McGrath, 2006). The Idea of “Sweatshop” Is a Relative Term The word “sweatshop” is definitely negative and brings up pictures of crowded, filthy conditions and workers slaving over noisy machines 20 hours a day, seven days a week for a monthly wage that would buy them dinner-for-two in the United States. Americans tend to cast human rights issues from our own founding principals of equality and justice for all, and tend to think of wages and poverty in terms of our own expectations for people living in the United States. Equality and poverty are relative terms when looking at the practices of developing nations, where most of the terrible factory conditions exist. (Yes, there are sweatshops in the United States; this essay will not examine that issue.) The best way for a nation to address poverty is by providing its people with employment. Some of that employment comes from sweatshops. In East Asia between 1981 and 2001, the number of people living on less than $1 a day fell from 58 percent to 15 percent. The number of people living on less than $2 a day fell from 85 percent to 48 percent (North and Smietana, 2008). For the rest of the developing world such as India, poverty during the same period remained steady or increased because those nations did not embrace globalization and international trade. Multinational corporation-owned factories typically pay workers 10 percent or more of wages they would earn in similar jobs for other manufacturers. Jobs bring about another important transformation in social justice: they provide women with the means to be independent and to escape forced marriage (McGrath, 2008; North and Smietana, 2008). While Americans look at sweatshops as little better than slavery (and sometimes much, much worse), a woman’s alternative choice to a factory job could include white slavery, backbreaking farming, picking through the city dump, or manufacturing children. A job brings with it a certain freedom to pursue education and ideas, and a different social structure. Providing jobs for women also necessarily transforms the treatment of all women in a given nation, in a roundabout and painful process. All this positive feeling and social justice transformation must also be kept in perspective, however. Unsafe conditions and child labor dominate sweatshops. A sarcastic comment from Ehrenreich (2008) sums it up nicely: “[A multi-national corporation] should portray its child-staffed factories as part of a far-seeing welfare-to-work program, which will eventually be extended to American children as well” (13). A factory job gives a child or woman the means to feed the family, but that hardly raises the family out of poverty. Just enough, but not enough. It’s been said that if the Nike shoe manufacturing company in China paid its workers 50 cents an hour instead of 42 cents an hour, it would add less than a dollar to a pair of shoes (Engardio, 2006; Levenson, 2008). While this may be a logical leap for the Western mind, it doesn’t work that way in practice. A pair of shoes does not go directly from the manufacturer to somebody’s feet. In fact, the materials for items come from a wide variety of places, each with their own social justice violations (McGrath, 2006; North and Smietana, 2008; Levenson, 2008). It is not a simple problem with a direct, easily implemented answer. For garment workers who put in sixteen hours a day in return for $2, it is somehow better than nothing. How the American Consumer Can Deal with the Deeper Moral Issues of Sweatshops Some companies, while they get into trouble occasionally, have good track-records when it comes to buying goods manufactured in safe, clean, and fair-wage factories (Frank, 2008). Mattel, the largest toy supplier in the United States, and Nike, famous brand name clothing and shoe supplier, have cleaned up their corporate images and have exemplary (and public) corporate compliance programs. Nike especially has made great strides since 1998 when it was revealed they used sweatshops for their clothing manufacturers (Levenson, 2008). Americans tend to attack problems in American ways: we don’t like something, so we march, protest and boycott. That is our right as Americans, guaranteed by the Constitution. For instance, two dozen students occupied the Chancellor’s office on the University of North Carolina campus in May of 2008, part of a student movement United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) that involved at least 42 campuses (Madadi, 2008). The groups were calling for a Designated Supplier Program for their schools, wherein the clothing would come from suppliers who pledged to protect human rights. In 2006, this same group visited 12 nations known to manufacture college-logo apparel in sweatshops (Radical Teacher, 2006). Other protests and general boycotts of big box stores happen and are effective, at least for awhile, at getting the sweatshop issue some air time. In developing nations, especially Asian nations, such tactics would never bring about transformational change. A protestor is likely to be shot, run over by a tank, or jailed. In order to create transformation in human rights, say policy makers, violators must be called to the front publically and internationally, and protestors must use “shame and embarrassment to great advantage” (North and Smietana, 2008, p. 33; Engardio, 2006). Powerful nations must play the role of mother and be on constant watch to protect individual workers and teach them how to organize and improve their conditions. Boycotts only make Americans feel better. Thinking along these lines will probably bring about social justice eventually (Engardio, 2006). But what can an American consumer do? While it would be a nice dream to have a few million of us board planes and storm the sweatshops in India, we’re unlikely to do so. We vote, as usual, with our wallets, and our own conflicting wants and needs. We also work hard for our money, even though those wages would propel a sweatshop worker into the top 1 percent of wealth in her nation. Everything is relative; we earn more money and pay more money, and want luxury items and closets full of unworn garments for the least money possible. Perhaps Americans also need to begin at the beginning when addressing this social justice issue: with our own insatiable desires and our willingness to exploit others, up to a carefully drawn line. What Is the Solution to the Sweatshop Issue? It is good that consumers pay at least a little attention to where their goods come from, and demand some accountability from themselves and from retailers. Americans can hardly expect overnight revolutions in human rights in nations where there have not been human rights, and those activists and corporations that work with top management (or the government) really could bring about changes. An optimist would see the efforts of retailers to balance our demand for quick-quality-cheap goods with the rights of the people making them as a step in the right direction. A cynic has to wonder two things about independent inspections and corporate compliance programs, though: First, how do the whistle-blowing activists find out the real truth when inspectors self-admittedly miss a great many violations; and second, do corporations (not individual corporate employees, corporations as organizations) really want to do something about it, or are they just giving lip-service to the consumer who demands cheap goods? The sweatshop issue is basically about human rights, and American consumers who purchase goods manufactured under unfair labor standards are committing human rights violations. We might think we’re simply buying socks because we need them, or that a dozen birthday gifts for our kids are acceptable. There are certainly manufacturers in foreign nations who do not violate their workers’ rights, and without close investigation the consumer does not know where the goods originated from. Just because a factory is in China does not automatically mean it’s a sweatshop. We are confused, and so most of us ignore the issue entirely. Unfortunately, small progress in foreign factories still does not meet the American ideal of human rights, and there are larger ramifications for the American consumer than the woman or child who sewed their clothes, like how much they have to pay for an item. There are many things wrong with this picture, beginning with the ten-year-old boy who slaves in an Indian garment factory, all the way to the end with the 10-year-old boy who receives a “styling” pair of jeans for his birthday and has no idea what really went into making it. Works Cited Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Slaves for Fashion.” Progressive (January 2008): pp. 12-13. Accessed 16 April 2009 from Academic Search Premiere EBSCO host database. Engardio, Pete. “Steamed Over Sweatshops.” BusinessWeek (18 December 2006): 129-130. Accessed 16 April 2009 from Academic Search Premiere EBSCO host database. Frank, T.A. “Confessions of a Sweatshop Inspector.” Washington Monthly 40:4 (April 2008): 34-37. Accessed 16 April 2009 from Academic Search Premiere EBSCO host database. Gogoi, Pallavi. “Wal-Mart Supplier Accused of Sweatshop Conditions.” Business Week Online (10 October 2008): 5-5. Accessed 16 April 2009 from Academic Search Premiere EBSCO host database. Levenson, Eugenia. “Citizen Nike.” Fortune 158:10 (24 November 2008): 165-170. Accessed 16 April 2009 from Academic Search Premiere EBSCO host database. Madadi, Yasmin. “USAS Kicks Ass.” Nation 286:18 (12 May 2008): 5-5. Accessed 16 April 2009 from Academic Search Premiere EBSCO host database. McGrath, Siobhan. “Stitching Together a Movement? Three Works about Globalization, the Apparel Industry, and Anti-Sweatshop Activism.” Antipode 38:4 (September 2006): 871-877. North, Charles M., and Smietana, Bob. “Shopping for Justice.” Christian Century 125:5 (11 March 2008: 30-33. Accessed 16 April 2009 from Academic Search Premier EBSCO host database. Radical Teacher. “Student Protest.” Radical Teacher (December 2006): p. 42. Accessed 16 April 2009 from Academic Search Premiere EBSCO host database. Read More