What about this don’t you get? We spend so much time defending sweatshops because we place the defense of human dignity and prosperity above any self-righteous measures that make first world activists feel better about themselves while further impoverishing the people who can least afford a diminution in income.

Sweatshops bring people out of poverty, You are nuts. I notice that you did not list any Latin American countries among those “saved” by sweatshops.

You’ve said a number of times that the actions of anti-sweatshop activists only really make sense in the context of their larger struggle for economic justice, and that even if fighting sweatshops makes people in the developing world worse off in the short run, this is necessary as part of the larger strategy to fundamentally change conditions in the developing world so that people are no longer forced to make the sorts of choices that lead them to work in sweatshops. My support for sweatshops is also part of a larger strategy that aims at this purpose. The difference is that the strategy I support has actually been successful. Look at what happened in the West, in Japan, and South Korea, and Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and Singapore, at what’s happening now in places like China and India and Vietnam. Literally billions of people have moved out of extreme poverty in these places, not because they followed the dictates of liberation theology or anarch-socialism, but because they took advantage of the amazing wealth generating powers of the free market. And in pretty much every case, sweatshops were one stage in that economic development.

Trying to stop sweatshops is like kicking out the bottom rungs of a ladder out of a pit. It does the people stuck in the pit no favors.

Fantastic.

A company, for example, could…

How about, rather than your hypothetical example, we say:

A company, for example, could MOVE ITS MANUFACTURING PLANTS TO A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY IN ORDER TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ALREADY-EXISTING POVERTY AND LACK OF HUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTIONS SOLELY FOR THE SAKE OF PROFIT.

Is this “socially harmful” (or hell, personally harmful to actually existing, concrete human persons with names and addresses)? If so, what do you propose should be done about it? Letting it be, simply out of some opinion that this situation is “better than *the* alternatives” will not do for any serious Christian. Are you willing to call the motivations involved “sinful”? If so, how do we work to resist this sin as Christians?

First, what I said was that *some* (not all) people who claimed to act out of compassion for the poor and vulnerable were really motivated by the desire to appear compassionate or to be trendy. To deny this is to hide one’s head in the sand.

Second, if you’ll read my post closely, you’ll see that my focus was on how different motivations might lead to different practical results. Someone truly concerned with the poor may do X, while someone engaging in conspicuous compassion will more likely to Y, which is not as good for the poor but which makes them look better than they otherwise would.

Likewise, I do think that the motivations of businessmen can lead them to do things that are socially harmful, and that we should be on guard against this. A company, for example, could increase its profit by offering people a service better than any of their competitors, or it could increase its profits by using the government to pass laws harming their competition. The first will generally speaking be socially beneficial, the second will not.

The thought is this: Entrepreneurs face greater risks than salaried employees. Sure, salaried employees can be fired, but they don’t all go without pay for the month everytime there’s a momentary downturn. So lots and lots of people don’t want the risk of being an entrepreneur. By the same token, if they forego the risk, they’ll be placing that risk on someone else . . . namely, the evil capitalists (or shareholders), who invest their own money and then bear the risk of having month-to-month variations in profit/losses. So if someone else is bearing the risk, then the salaried employees will be paid less . . . they are sacrificing some potential income in exchange for having someone else take the risk of putting up a huge amount of money to fund the enterprise.

The major problem I have with your thinking is that sweatshops simply cannot be part of any sane vision of global economic justice. That you (and Paul Krugman and the like) spend so much time defending their existence as well as multinational corporations’ right to do as they wish appears to me (and some others here) to be putting the defense of capitalism above the defense of human persons and above any credible desire for economic justice.

If you continue to insist that a desire for justice and “commitment to the poor” is really what is driving your posts on sweatshops, follow it up then by injecting a little Christian ethics into your reflections. OK, so you advocate allowing corporations to ‘do their thing’ and exploit poor persons across the globe because it’ll be “better” in the long run. Is that all you can say about it? You have criticized those who advocate for social and economic justice for doing it “only for show,” to make themselves look good” in front of their friends and neighbors (quite a charge), so the intentions of certain acts are important to you. Yet on the other hand you don’t seem to care that corporations us cheap foreign labor only to make more money, and say that “that’s just how it works.” Even if sweatshops DID “help the poor in the long run” as you claim (never has this actually occurred), don’t the intentions of corporations (simple exploitation) matter?

From my perspective, constructive solutions to social problems generally involve adding to people’s options, rather than subtracting from them. If co-operative factories really are a viable alternative to sweatshops, then one need only start some, and people will gladly choose them over the old least worst option of working in a sweatshop. On the other hand, if for some reason such factories aren’t a viable alternative (and the fact that Michael’s example involved workers taking over an abandoned factory and having to go without pay for extended periods of time suggests that it might not be) then banning sweatshops in anticipation that they will be replaced with clean, well-paying jobs in a co-operative is dangerously naive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cooperatives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives