I used to flip past news items about the “anti-sweatshop” crusade, but I began keeping a file when I realized its agenda had grown more elastic than the waistband on a Kathie Lee Gifford jogging suit:
n After getting clobbered among informed people on the trade issue, the AFL-CIO has switched tack and now says it fights imports not because they might cost American jobs but because they’re made under sweatshop conditions.
n Anti-immigration groups oppose letting even highly skilled professionals onto these shores. A bill to liberalize the H-1 B visa program, which facilitates entry of software engineers and other sought-after talent, “should rightly be called the Silicon Valley Sweatshop Act,” argues Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
n Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy and Missouri Rep. William Clay, both Democrats, have introduced a “Stop Sweatshops Act” that would hold retailers liable for labor law violations committed at separate companies thousands of miles away that make clothing under contract with the stores.
n Where “vicarious liability” is in the wind, trial lawyers are often not far behind: Class-actioneer William Lerach has filed suit against the Gap, Wal-Mart, the Limited, and other retailers over conditions at Chinese- and South Korean-owned factories in the Northern Marianas Islands that produce clothing under contract.
n In April, Notre Dame, considered a pacesetter among universities on the issue, announced it would heed the urgings of its Anti-Sweatshop Task Force and cease allowing the manufacture of its licensed goods in any of 13 nations whose laws are considered insufficiently protective of workers, a curious assortment of countries ranging from China and Iran to Thailand and New Zealand. New Zealand? New Zealand’s work force is in fact slightly more unionized than ours, at 17% versus 14% as of 1998.
We seem to have witnessed here a kind of upwardly democratized redefinition of oppression.
But are these anti-sweatshop efforts in fact helping workers in poorer countries?
The generally liberal MIT economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says “the lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through Global poverty is not something recently invented for the benefit of multinational corporations.” Indeed, “the supposed friends of poor workers abroad are no friends at all. If they got their way the result for the poor Freedonian would not just be no sweatshop,it would be no job.”
Appalling as they may seem to Westerners, Krugman points out, wages and working conditions in the new Third World export industries are usually a big improvement over the less visible rural poverty that came before. “In 1975 South Korean wages were only 5% of those in the United States; by 1995 they had risen to 43%,” he writes. “Manufactured exports, initially based on low wages, are the only route we know for rapid economic development.”
To be sure, there really are some sleazy employers who defraud workers of wages or coerce them in other ways. (Keeping immigrants’ passports under lock and key to discourage them from running away is one favorite.) But the effort to distinguish between such practices and “normal” employment in low-wage contexts isn’t easy given the anti-sweatshop crusade’s insistence that the determination of what constitutes intolerable working conditions must never be left up to the local workers themselves, nor to the governments of the countries in which they work, democratically elected or otherwise.
In place of any serious effort to distinguish between good and bad, we now wind up with absurdities like the Notre Dame standards. Joining New Zealand and Thailand on the college’s blacklist are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, wealthy oil countries not likely to bother with the business of exporting college-logo sports gear and sun visors.
And it gets worse when you consider the countries that didn’t make the proscribed list. Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Libya, and the Sudan (a country in which actual, no-kidding human chattel slavery is said to persist) can continue as acceptable venues for the production of key chains and caps imprinted with the Fighting Irish mascot. What a moral inspiration to us all!
A year and a half ago I had a chance to visit New Zealand, an exceptionally pleasant, spacious, and egalitarian corner of the world known for flightless birds and America’s Cup boat racing, whose most pressing social problem of late has been convincing the rest of the world that it’s not actually part of Australia.
I spent some of my time discussing with professors and practicing lawyers the country’s somewhat distinctive labor laws, introduced by a Thatcherite administration some years back (and now under reconsideration by its more left-leaning successor government). It would be misleading to characterize these laws as either to the “left” or the “right” of ours. Kiwi employers are less constrained than American ones in some respects, more so in many others.
For example, official tribunals can order New Zealand employers to reinstate fired workers, a system without exact parallel here. One of the novelties introduced in the Employment Contract of 1991, however, was a new right of individual workers to bypass union representation and reach individualized contracts with their employers if they wish. Many workers have taken advantage of this new right, weakening unions’ power; by coincidence or not, the years that followed have seen the New Zealand economy enter an export-led boom impressive even by today’s world standards.
So impressive has the boom been, in fact, that the island country has become a magnet for Asian immigrants hoping to make their fortune. Last year authorities raided an Auckland sewing shop whose Thai owner was found to be overworking and mistreating eight of her compatriots. She was promptly arrested and brought to trial, where she was made to pay fines and compensation totaling NZ $370,000 under the country’s wage and hour laws.
The case caused a sensation in the Kiwi press in part because it fed into ongoing anguish about the country’s perceived Americanization: You think this sort of thing goes on only in Los Angeles, and now it has come here! And indeed, The American Prospect tells us that LA alone has more than 160,000 sweatshop workers.
Memo to my faraway friends in Wellington, Christchurch, and Rotorua: Thanks for not boycotting us.
Olson (www.walterolson.com) is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of Reason magazine (www.reason.com), from whose July issue this article is adapted.
