Sweatshop Definitions
Should beautiful, single women be required to conceal their appearance?
Should wealthy, old, single men be required to hide their wealth?
In my previous post, I stated my frustration with the dearth of a good definition of "sweatshop". From what I can glean from the web, sweatshop seems to have the following definitions, based on the context, and depending greatly on the author:
Here is what I am prepared to accept as a definition of a sweatshop worthy of protest:
Many foreign countries have laws that prevent union or other organization. I am as opposed to those as I am to laws which allow closed shop contracts or which require employers to recognize unions. In the US, closed shop contracts are illegal (Taft-Hartley), but there is a loophole which unions routinely exploit: you can't compel employees to join the union, but you can compel them to pay dues. You can't require them to pay for non-bargaining activities (Beck), but the burden is on the employees to get their money back from the Union. Everyone should be allowed to talk and to coordinate their activities with everyone else who agrees to do so, but should not be required to coordinate with someone they don't want.
I read about shops where women may be compelled to have sex as a condition of employment, but it isn't clear how common this is. If this was not an explicit part of the arrangement, I believe that this is a fraudulent arrangement perpetrated by the management. If it's one rogue manager, fire him, but if it's a pattern of behavior, then I agree that the place is worthy of protest. Likewise a factory where other side deals are made as a condition of employment, or where corporal punishment is used.
If the factory shows one face to the employee before they agree to work (which means quitting other jobs and leaving other commitments), and then another when they actually start working, that's fraud. If they make claims about safety or working conditions (1) that they know to be untrue and (2) that they make for the purpose of deceiving the employees, that is fraud. On the other hand, if the employees know about these things from other sources (friends and family), and agree to them anyhow, I don't see the problem with that. Many factories in developing countries probably keep up fronts for ill-informed, busybody activists, and the workers are probably well aware of the reality behind the facade, so I qualified "misrepresenting" with "successfully" in my definition.
Finally, I am assuming that we are talking about people who are capable of rational decision-making. That may or may not be the case for everyone. Caveats apply for the mentally handicapped and for children. However, the relevant difference between children and adults is not age, but maturity and understanding. Unfortunately, we don't have a good test for maturity, so we choose a bright line rule and say that everyone under 18 years of age is not an adult. We let children as young as 14 work in non-farm settings, though they still don't enjoy the other privileges and responsibilities of adulthood. We don't let anyone under 21 drink, but we do let them enlist, so these rules are not necessarily logical. I think it is perfectly reasonable for every culture to make their own decisions about the appropriate adulthood rule, since in many societies children are more self-reliant than they are in our own culture. Even in our own society, we make concessions to farming, where children learn work habits much younger because they actually participate in it. As cultures become more complex, it takes longer to learn all of the rules (anyone remember the comparison in The Gods Must Be Crazy?), and I think that we made a mistake by banning children from work. After all, it means that we sit them inwarehouses schools where they learn nonsense instead of participating in meaningful apprenticeship programs such as they still have in Germany.
Kathleen suggests a good test for determining if a factory meets all of my requirements for not being a sweatshop: if they are willing to let you come in and visit or inspect, they are not a sweatshop. A sweatshop is likely to be an illegal operation, hiding from the public in more ways than one. The El Monte sweatshop discovered in 1995 was staffed by (mostly) girls who had immigrated illegally from Thailand and were kept in involuntary servitude to an organized crime ring which saw alien smuggling to be a profitable adjunct to drug smuggling.
The definitions of sweatshop that seem to be a little serious also seem to me to be vague. It used to be claimed that software companies treated their workers "inhumanely", forcing them to work long hours. Since the dot-com implosion, those same workers' biggest complaint is unemployment, which they increasingly blame on offshore software development from India. Guess what they call those factories full of professionials that trained in foreign universities? (Be sure to check out the "selected occupations" highlighted in Figure 1 on the link)
NFL linemen have a lifetime expectancy of about 55 years old, so it would seem that the NFL is a sweatshop if you use "demanding levels of performance that are harmful to the workers" as a criteria. The same is largely true of professional cyclists, yet I saw very few protestors along the route or the Tour de France.
Here is what I am not going to accept as a definition of a sweatshop (can we come up with another word?):
And "poor pay"? This is probably the least well defined phrase on the internet. It's so bad that I'm going to leave it to another post.
I like my definition of "sweatshop" much better than anything I could find on the internet, but I might be biased. Most writers on the subject are so poorly informed that you cannot believe they are serious. Applying their vague formulations to the apparel industry is insulting to the people who actually enjoy working in the industry. People who write about this seem to forget that while pay in other countries is much lower than what they would accept, it is not as bad when you consider their cost of living, and almost always better than their other options. These activists think they are doing those workers a favor when in fact they are attempting to take away their only competitive advantage.
Those activists would put bags on the heads of beautiful women and chains around the wallets of old men and then send us all out to find a mate on the claim that this would "force" beautiful women to develop a personality and rich old men to develop a sense of youth. But what if rich old men just want beautiful women and women just want rich, old men? Nobody is going to be happy under the bag-and-chain scheme, but at least everyone will be equal in their misery.
Should wealthy, old, single men be required to hide their wealth?
In my previous post, I stated my frustration with the dearth of a good definition of "sweatshop". From what I can glean from the web, sweatshop seems to have the following definitions, based on the context, and depending greatly on the author:
- Any apparel or footwear factory
- Any apparel or footwear factory in a developing country, especially if they make products for export to the West
- Any apparel or footwear factory in a developing country that does contract work for a well-known person or company (Nike, Reebok, Gap, Kathie Lee Gifford)
- Any apparel or footwear factory in the US that hires immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants
- Any place of work that the author finds to be undesirable
- A manufacturing workplace that treats its workers inhumanely, paying low wages, imposing harsh and unsafe working conditions, and demanding levels of performance that are harmful to the workers. (www-personal.umich.edu/~alandear/glossary/s.html)
- factory where workers do piecework for poor pay and are prevented from forming unions; common in the clothing industry (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn)
Here is what I am prepared to accept as a definition of a sweatshop worthy of protest:
- Any factory where the workers are legally prevented from quitting, striking, or organizing, and/or where the employers have perpetrated a fraud upon the workers by successfully misrepresenting the conditions of work.
Many foreign countries have laws that prevent union or other organization. I am as opposed to those as I am to laws which allow closed shop contracts or which require employers to recognize unions. In the US, closed shop contracts are illegal (Taft-Hartley), but there is a loophole which unions routinely exploit: you can't compel employees to join the union, but you can compel them to pay dues. You can't require them to pay for non-bargaining activities (Beck), but the burden is on the employees to get their money back from the Union. Everyone should be allowed to talk and to coordinate their activities with everyone else who agrees to do so, but should not be required to coordinate with someone they don't want.
I read about shops where women may be compelled to have sex as a condition of employment, but it isn't clear how common this is. If this was not an explicit part of the arrangement, I believe that this is a fraudulent arrangement perpetrated by the management. If it's one rogue manager, fire him, but if it's a pattern of behavior, then I agree that the place is worthy of protest. Likewise a factory where other side deals are made as a condition of employment, or where corporal punishment is used.
If the factory shows one face to the employee before they agree to work (which means quitting other jobs and leaving other commitments), and then another when they actually start working, that's fraud. If they make claims about safety or working conditions (1) that they know to be untrue and (2) that they make for the purpose of deceiving the employees, that is fraud. On the other hand, if the employees know about these things from other sources (friends and family), and agree to them anyhow, I don't see the problem with that. Many factories in developing countries probably keep up fronts for ill-informed, busybody activists, and the workers are probably well aware of the reality behind the facade, so I qualified "misrepresenting" with "successfully" in my definition.
Finally, I am assuming that we are talking about people who are capable of rational decision-making. That may or may not be the case for everyone. Caveats apply for the mentally handicapped and for children. However, the relevant difference between children and adults is not age, but maturity and understanding. Unfortunately, we don't have a good test for maturity, so we choose a bright line rule and say that everyone under 18 years of age is not an adult. We let children as young as 14 work in non-farm settings, though they still don't enjoy the other privileges and responsibilities of adulthood. We don't let anyone under 21 drink, but we do let them enlist, so these rules are not necessarily logical. I think it is perfectly reasonable for every culture to make their own decisions about the appropriate adulthood rule, since in many societies children are more self-reliant than they are in our own culture. Even in our own society, we make concessions to farming, where children learn work habits much younger because they actually participate in it. As cultures become more complex, it takes longer to learn all of the rules (anyone remember the comparison in The Gods Must Be Crazy?), and I think that we made a mistake by banning children from work. After all, it means that we sit them in
Kathleen suggests a good test for determining if a factory meets all of my requirements for not being a sweatshop: if they are willing to let you come in and visit or inspect, they are not a sweatshop. A sweatshop is likely to be an illegal operation, hiding from the public in more ways than one. The El Monte sweatshop discovered in 1995 was staffed by (mostly) girls who had immigrated illegally from Thailand and were kept in involuntary servitude to an organized crime ring which saw alien smuggling to be a profitable adjunct to drug smuggling.
The definitions of sweatshop that seem to be a little serious also seem to me to be vague. It used to be claimed that software companies treated their workers "inhumanely", forcing them to work long hours. Since the dot-com implosion, those same workers' biggest complaint is unemployment, which they increasingly blame on offshore software development from India. Guess what they call those factories full of professionials that trained in foreign universities? (Be sure to check out the "selected occupations" highlighted in Figure 1 on the link)
NFL linemen have a lifetime expectancy of about 55 years old, so it would seem that the NFL is a sweatshop if you use "demanding levels of performance that are harmful to the workers" as a criteria. The same is largely true of professional cyclists, yet I saw very few protestors along the route or the Tour de France.
Here is what I am not going to accept as a definition of a sweatshop (can we come up with another word?):
- A factory in a developing country where the employees know about the work conditions and pay and freely choose those over their other options despite the fact that, in comparison to the West, the pay is much lower and the conditions much worse than those to which we are accustomed.
And "poor pay"? This is probably the least well defined phrase on the internet. It's so bad that I'm going to leave it to another post.
I like my definition of "sweatshop" much better than anything I could find on the internet, but I might be biased. Most writers on the subject are so poorly informed that you cannot believe they are serious. Applying their vague formulations to the apparel industry is insulting to the people who actually enjoy working in the industry. People who write about this seem to forget that while pay in other countries is much lower than what they would accept, it is not as bad when you consider their cost of living, and almost always better than their other options. These activists think they are doing those workers a favor when in fact they are attempting to take away their only competitive advantage.
Those activists would put bags on the heads of beautiful women and chains around the wallets of old men and then send us all out to find a mate on the claim that this would "force" beautiful women to develop a personality and rich old men to develop a sense of youth. But what if rich old men just want beautiful women and women just want rich, old men? Nobody is going to be happy under the bag-and-chain scheme, but at least everyone will be equal in their misery.
Labels: philosophy, sweatshops, unions
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