Schindler’s Sweatshops
Oskar Schindler was a German businessman and Nazi party member. During World War II, Schindler opened a factory in Poland making enamel kitchenware using Jewish slave labor. Life for the Jewish workers in Schindler’s factory was far superior to life in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps to which they would otherwise have been subjected. Still, working conditions in Schindler’s factory were such that, were they to occur in a factory in the developing world today, they would no doubt be roundly condemned. Nevertheless, Schindler is today known as a hero precisely because of the kind comparatively kind treatment he bestowed on the Jewish workers in his factories during WWII.
No doubt much of the heroism associated with Schindler’s actions has to do with his motivations. While he started his factory merely with an eye towards making money, as the war progressed he became motivated by concern for his workers in their own right, to the extent that by the end of the war he was willing to lose all of the fortune he had earlier amassed protecting his workers form the Nazis. Had he acted purely out of self-interest (first out of a desire for money, then out of a desire to save his own skin by ingratiating himself with his soon to be liberated Jewish employees) then he would likely be regarded not with awe but with disdain. But if the only difference between Schindler the hero and Schindler the villain is his motivation (not any of his actions, or the results thereof), then we must admit that it cannot be per se immoral for employers to employ workers in horrible conditions and with little or no pay.
Further, even if Schindler had not acted from altruistic motives, this would not have changed the fact that life in his factory was far superior for those who worked there than any realistic alternative. To suggest that, because of his impure motivations, it would have been better had his factory not existed, or that the only moral course of action for Schindler was to pay his workers a living wage and provide Western working conditions or shut down, is not very plausible, morally speaking.
The upshot of all this is that the question of whether action ought to be taken to prohibit or close sweatshops turns largely on a question of fact rather than on a dispute about moral principle. Advocates of a “laissez-faire” approach to the question of sweatshops do not deny the low pay or poor conditions that accompany sweatshops. They maintain, however, that as with Schindler’s factories the jobs there are 1) better than the alternatives, and 2) will lead to better pay and conditions over time. And while disputes over matters of fact are not always clear, it should be noted that the factual case in favor of allowing sweatshops has won over a number of people who one wouldn’t think of as being terribly predisposed towards the free market, such as New York Times Columnists and the Communist Party of Vietnam.
Or, in many cases the factory workers themselves. As New York Times columnists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn write in their book Thunder from the East:
Fourteen years ago, we moved to Asia and began reporting there. Like most Westerners, we arrived in the region outraged at sweatshops. In time, though, we came to accept the view supported by most Asians: that the campaign against sweatshops risks harming the very people it is intended to help. For beneath their grime, sweatshops are a clear sign of the industrial revolution that is beginning to reshape Asia.
The reason many workers in the developing world favor sweatshops is that they can see the benefits such factories bring with their own eyes. As Johan Norberg describes the situation:
Ten years ago, when Nike was established in Vietnam, the workers had to walk to the factories, often for many miles. After three years on Nike wages, they could afford bicycles. Another three years later, they could afford scooters, so they all take the scooters to work (and if you go there, beware; they haven´t really decided on which side of the road to drive). Today, the first workers can afford to buy a car.
Sweatshop workers may also have a somewhat different perspective on the alternatives to their current line of work. Here’s Norberg again:
when I talk to a young Vietnamese woman, Tsi-Chi, at the factory, it is not the wages she is most happy about. Sure, she makes five times more than she did, she earns more than her husband, and she can now afford to build an extension to her house. But the most important thing, she says, is that she doesn´t have to work outdoors on a farm any more. For me, a Swede with only three months of summer, this sounds bizarre. Surely working conditions under the blue sky must be superior to those in a sweatshop? But then I am naively Eurocentric. Farming means 10 to 14 hours a day in the burning sun or the intensive rain, in rice fields with water up to your ankles and insects in your face.
I understand the visceral reaction that the poor pay and conditions can bring, and I can also understand why people might wish very much that sweatshops were an unnecessary evil, and that companies could be forced to pay workers in the developing world developed world wages without any negative unintended consequences. I would ask, though, that people be willing to consider the contrary arguments and evidence with an open mind, rather than simply dismissing them out of hand.
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More sweatshop-defending posts from BA. Nice.
There are many trade-offs involved here: industralization of poorer countries helps many rise into the middle class, and it expands opportunities for governmnents to facilitate better living standards, yet it also opens up new avenues for the domestic expolitation of cheaper labor among the wealth and human capital elite of the richer countries, harming those without the skills, time, or human capital necessary to keep up in a technologically dependent, information based economy. This damages community and the organic development of the common good. Pat Buchanan makes this point frequently, and I think persuasively: humans are social animals, not economic actors, first and most deeply in their personal, familial, and societal attachments. Our question and concerns, then, should be asked and addressed with our own citizens first in mind….until we magically discover a way to end policy trade-offs only for the positive, which I highly doubt is going to happen.
Actually I believe this would be the first post on sweatshops that I’ve written, though the subject has come up a couple of times in the comments to other posts.
Actually I believe this would be the first post on sweatshops that I’ve written, though the subject has come up a couple of times in the comments to other posts.
Right, right. It was in relation to you singing the praises of Paul Krugman’s defense of sweatshops, among other places.
Either way, your disgusting defense of the indefensible has been relentless.
BA – The elephant in the room is whose interests you’re defending. Answer: powerful capitalists who exploit workers in the third world.
You’re doing it in a very careful, parsed, lawyerly way, but peel away the veneer of gentility and you’re defending Moloch.
Exploiting workers in the third world (or, come to it, right here at home) is wrong and ought to be condemned, especially by Catholics. What other alternatives exist for those workers in their home countries? Are the choices only 1. Be ruthlessly exploited to aggrandize wealth to greedy capitalists, or 2. Starve?
The elephant in the room is whose interests you’re defending. Answer: powerful capitalists who exploit workers in the third world.
Actually, the interests I’m defending are those of the workers (similarly, someone who thought it was a good thing that Schindler’s factories were in operation and argued against any liberal humanitarian claims that they ought to be shut down would be defending the interests of the Jews, not those of of Nazi factory owners).
What other alternatives exist for those workers in their home countries? Are the choices only 1. Be ruthlessly exploited to aggrandize wealth to greedy capitalists, or 2. Starve?
I don’t know that those are the workers only two options (in previous cases where humanitarian efforts in the West led to sweatshops being shut down, the female workers often turned to prostitution). What I do know is that the workers in those factories consider the jobs better (and often far better) than any of their other options.
BA–
I don’t know that those are the workers only two options (in previous cases where humanitarian efforts in the West led to sweatshops being shut down, the female workers often turned to prostitution). What I do know is that the workers in those factories consider the jobs better (and often far better) than any of their other options.
What set of available options do you see?
Why do you think there are masses of poor people with no real good options in many of these countries? Why do you think that these people are so poor?
Is it possible that they are poor because the ruling eliete in many countries expropriated all of the good usable land and left masses of people with no good land of their own? Or maybe it is because in these countries it is illegal to organize a union? Or maybe it is because the legal structure makes it difficult for most people to obtain enough money to support themselves in any other way? Then this ruling group makes a deal with outside industrial interests to build a factory. They will provide the masses for labor. Do you really think the terms will be favorable to the workers or those with political clout?
You seem to be up on libertarian literature. Are you familiar with the work of Kevin Carson (www.mutualist.blogspot.com)? He has written two books on the topic of mutualism, which is related to both socialism and free-market libertarianism. I used to tend to agree with you B.A.. However, considering left-libertarian arguments I have come to see that big government is not opposed to big business but in support of it. In fact, without governmental support, businesses would be much smaller.
The claws are coming out tonight!
I think the problem here is one of miscommunication. When Blackadder writes something like “sweatshops are an improvement over forced prostitution and working in rice fields,” some people are constitutionally incapable of even finishing that sentence. They stop reading at the word “improvement,” and their outrage needle flickers up to 11, and thus it never even enters their head to consider the reasons that many people voluntarily flock to work in sweatshops in the first place.
Worse, they replace the second half of that sentence with thoughts that are completely of their own invention, that they falsely attribute to Blackadder. That is, they transform Blackadder’s sentiment to read, “sweatshops are an improvement, and in fact they’re the ideal human enterprise, and no one should ever try to improve sweatshop conditions for any reason, and sweatshop owners should be given a reward for being so kindhearted.”
Mr. Blackadderiv,
God gave you an brilliant intellect. When you use it to defend a horror that might be a little less horrible than another horror, you do this brilliant intellect an injustice. You defend these horrors admirably, brilliantly, with grand skill.
Why?
I have less intellect than you. Language skills and knowledge that are middling at best. Yet, I try to honor God by imagining that His children, my brothers and sisters, deserve dignity that recognizes they are made in His image, and that they constitute the Body of Christ. And indignities to them are still indignities, although less indignifying than alternatives. So these indignities, too, should be replaced with something better. Something dignifying.
So when I reject, in tragic English with poor logic, the working condition of the poor in the Third World, I work more for His Kingdom, than you. And my meager intellect and language skills are greater gifts for Him.
Yes, you will win the argument by human terms. You are that good. Actually brilliant. But are you serving His Kingdom by forwarding this argument?
Can’t you spend your grand talents for more than defending horrors, that, although better than alternatives, are still horrors?
Why do you think there are masses of poor people with no real good options in many of these countries? Why do you think that these people are so poor?
Is it possible that they are poor because the ruling eliete in many countries expropriated all of the good usable land and left masses of people with no good land of their own? Or maybe it is because in these countries it is illegal to organize a union?
Poverty has been the condition of the vast majority of humanity throughout most of human history, so to the extent there is a question here it is why the developing world hasn’t followed the developed world in becoming prosperous. I don’t think the answer has much to do with arable land or independent unions. Singapore had neither, and managed to rise from extreme poverty to prosperity in a single generation. The main cause, I think, has been bad government. If you compare one of the major economic freedom ranking with standards of living by country, the correlation is pretty tight. And the success of places like Singapore, etc. show that its possible to have very rapid and sustained growth if the legal structures are right.
I have come to see that big government is not opposed to big business but in support of it. In fact, without governmental support, businesses would be much smaller.
I agree.
In short, circumstances demand these horrible sweatshops and will ensure they are filled with employees. Does the horrid status quo truly need your efforts to justify it? Couldn’t you direct your efforts to think of something else that might be dignifying to these workers?
Just a thought.
When Blackadder writes something like “sweatshops are an improvement over forced prostitution and working in rice fields,” some people are constitutionally incapable of even finishing that sentence. They stop reading at the word “improvement,” . . .
S.B.
Would you be willing to say that labor induction abortions (“in which a solution is injected into the amniotic fluid, ending the life of the fetus and inducing labor”) are an improvement over partial-birth abortions?
It seems to me the Catholic Church always bends over backwards not to give “mixed messages.” Consequently, you won’t find the Church saying, “If you are going to have sex outside of marriage, at least use condoms to prevent pregnancy and the spread of disease.” (Of course, I personally think it is a very reasonable position, but I am talking about Catholic thought here.) That is, the Church doesn’t say, “If you have to choose between a greater evil and a lesser evil, you should choose the lesser evil.” The Church’s message is to avoid evil altogether. Somewhat similarly, it doesn’t seem very “Catholic” to me to argue that it is better for people to be miserably treated and underpaid in sweat shops than it is for them to be unemployed and forage for food in the local garbage dump. The Catholic position would be that people should be treated with dignity and respect and paid a living wage. Period. (Or at least that is my interpretation of how the Church approaches such things.)
The abortion question is a bit too weird.
As for avoiding the lesser evil . . . I think the point is that the Catholic Church (as distinguished from some people who substitute their own political ideologies here) surely doesn’t counsel that you should go around the world looking for lesser evils to combat by means of bringing about a greater evil.
If you can get rid of the lesser evil by actually improving things, well, great. No one has said a word against that possibility.
In any event, it’s a testament to the power of ideology over rationality that certain commenters can’t even grasp that there is a possibility of doing harm even when you pat yourself on the back for getting rid of a lesser evil. It would be one thing if these commenters said, “I don’t intend for anyone to go back to the rice fields or to forced prostitution, and here’s a real-world plan that would improve the sweatshops without throwing the workers there out in the streets.” But they don’t say that: It’s all just moralizing: “Oh, I’m going to faint, Blackadder said that we should aim for marginal improvements rather than going for utopia in one fell swoop! How evil.”
“In short, circumstances demand these horrible sweatshops and will ensure they are filled with employees. Does the horrid status quo truly need your efforts to justify it? Couldn’t you direct your efforts to think of something else that might be dignifying to these workers?”
That is the key question.
BA: no one is contesting the point that working in a sweatshop is better than starving to death. But that doesn’t mean that working in a sweatshop is _good_.
You can always point out something is worse than something else. But it would be better to try to improve the circumstances — the system — that forces people to choose between sweatshop labor and death.
In the same way, Schindler’s workers, and Schindler himself, did what they had to do. But we can also see, and say, that the entire set of circumstances was bad. It was a bad system that forced the escaping Jews to choose between working in Schindler’s factories or die. Of course there was no choice. Just as there no choice when desperately poor people work in sweatshops. And just as the situation in Nazi Germany was quite objectively bad, so today, the international economy that forces people into sweatshops is bad.
The goal should be to think of something better, not to think of something worse in order to justify one’s own self-satisfaction.
BA–
This may sound really stupid, but I have to ask. What do you mean by poverty and what do you mean by prosperity?
I’m not sure that most of the world was in extreme poverty from time immemorial. Subsistence farming was actually not such a horrible living as long as there was access to good land. In fact, the entire industrial revolution in England (as well as many other European countries) only followed a general expropriation of land by the aristocracy. Many industrialists were even then concerned about how to force people into factory labor when they could live off their own land, and there was an entire set of laws regulating daily life that this fear inspired.
Furthermore, how do you characterize prosperity? What makes Singapore prosperous now as opposed to any other time?
I agree with Daniel Conway’s comments.
I wonder whether his diabetic father works in one and doesn’t complain.
If this country gradually improved employees’ rights, in about 100 years it’d still be indentured servitude to, oh, pretty much any Western country. It’s so bad that it took me a while to realize it and what I had in Austria.
I point you to my listing of Austria’s amazing protection of pregnant women and mothers in the “French Health care” post. Apart from the fact that there are no sweatshops in Austria, a woman couldn’t work in one 8 weeks before and after birth, being paid her full salary by the “socialist” state and being nigh-immune from being fired. Well and sweatshops would probably not work due to the minimum wage laws (boohisss….regulations) – about $1200 per month after taxes.
Sweatshop = better than Holocaust.
Sweatshop = better than latrine licking
Of course, at the time, latrine licking was a real improvement that should not be dismissed out of hand. We have to let progress take its natural toll I mean course.
Well, my husband used to beat me every day, now he only does it on weekdays. Someday soon, he may confine it to high holidays.
And Americans may one day enjoy 5 weeks of legally required minimum vacation. Hey, 1 week is a great improvement from child labor from dusk till dawn, so let’s not dismiss it out of hand. Let’s hoist the flag and salute it.
Among the blind, the one-eyed is king.
Apart from the fact that there are no sweatshops in Austria, a woman couldn’t work in one 8 weeks before and after birth, being paid her full salary by the “socialist” state and being nigh-immune from being fired
And yet, despite all that, Austrian women have significantly fewer children than American women.
Subsistence farming was actually not such a horrible living as long as there was access to good land. In fact, the entire industrial revolution in England (as well as many other European countries) only followed a general expropriation of land by the aristocracy.
Let me requote something from my post:
Tsi-Chi, at least, has a different opinion on the relative merits of sweatshops vs. subsistence farming (and, I suspect that she has more first hand experience with both than either you or I).
There used to be a saying in rural America: How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Manhattan? The worry was not that greedy aristocrats were going to kick farmers off their land, but that once people knew about the alternatives, waking up at the crack of dawn to milk cows wouldn’t seem so appealing.
What makes Singapore prosperous now as opposed to any other time?
Per capita income in Singapore in 1965 was around $500 a year. Today it is around $35,000.
One of the things people seem to be missing here is that Blackadder is not, so far as I can tell, saying that companies should not work to improve conditions in third world factories, nor that people and companies should not seek better business models and better facilities which allow people to make more and work in better conditions in the third world while still growing their businesses.
The problem is, the solutions that are often proposed are much better at simply shutting down factories and causing companies to avoid the third world entirely than they are at actually improving conditions.
On the other hand, the track record is pretty good for continued economic growth and continued improvement in conditions in developing countries if things are allowed to progress “naturally” from poor factories to better and more efficient ones. More beneficial to workers in the long run will usually be pushing for clean government and open markets in these developing countries, so that large employers don’t take advantage of trade restrictions or bribing government to keep competition out and thus avoid the necessity of improving over time.
So in order to have more children, one needs to treat mothers worse. Uhhh ? You know who has the most children ? Women in the most messed up countries. Maybe we should follow those countries’ example.
Not to mention that, without immigrants, this country wouldn’t exactly be reproducing like rabbit.