Counterpoint to Sweatshop Thinking

From the Mutualist Blog, another viewpoint. First you have the anti-sweatshop activists and scholars. Then the anti-anti-sweatshop scholars and hangers-on. Now, anti-anti-anti-sweatshop scholarship from Ellenita Muetze Hellmer. JLS editor Roderick Long writes this about her article (not free, as of this writing):

In "Establishing Government Accountability in the Anti-Sweatshop Campaign: Toward a Logical, Activist Approach to Improving the Working Conditions of the Poor," Ellenita Muetze Hellmer questions the logic of this response, given the fact in many of these cases the employment is not truly chosen voluntarily -- either because the government literally and directly forces people to work at certain jobs, or else because government policies that displace farmers from their land leave sweatshop labor as their only alternative. Where multinational corporations are the beneficiaries of state-mandated slave labor or something close to it -- Hellmer cites instances from Burma, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador -- the libertarian impulse to defend sweatshops is no longer valid. In such cases, Hellmer argues, it is a mistake to think that boycotts and embargoes hurt the workers, since most of the "wages" from such schemes are going to government officials rather than the workers anyway, and disinvestment could have the salutary effect of discouraging these tyrannical policies, or of weakening oppressive regimes by reducing their revenue. Hence Hellmer recommends, not abandoning the anti-sweatshop campaign, but rather reorienting it so as to focus on genuinely coercive arrangements.

I am forced to adjust my definition of a sweatshop, justified here:

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, and/or where the workers were forced out of their (now) second-best choice of work by government policy.

Kathleen gave me another way of thinking about this; workers should control the condition of their employment, specifically whether or not they can quit at will. I will read the Hellmer article when it becomes free (yeah, I'm that cheap), as I think it adds another wrinkle to this debate.

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