« Blog Search by Location | Main | Fire Thunder Challenges South Dakota Abortion Ban »
March 14, 2006
Economists for Sweatshops
Henry and I are reading Jeff Sachs’ The End of Poverty this week. The gist of his argument is that it’s unjustifiable to have a sixth of the global population in such desperate poverty that they must struggle for day to day survival; that the key is for well off countries to lower “the ladder of development” into these countries to allow them to climb up on their own. “The ladder of development” means aid, it means debt cancellation, it means international pressure for responsible governing.
In his introduction, Sachs lays out some examples of countries as reference points along the ladder’s development continuum. Malawi doesn’t have a ladder, he says. The picture Sachs paints is a country of small farmers, a country ravaged by malaria and AIDS, a country without the funds to afford preventative medicines and without the infrastructure to deliver them. No ladder.
One rung above Malawi is Bangladesh, with a thriving economy of “apparel firms” (read: sweatshops). Raised as I was to be label-conscious of the manufacturer’s labor practices, it turns my stomach a bit to think that sweatshops can be one rung above anything. But I suppose that’s a function of my swanky American passport, too.
I lived with a group of Bushmen just outside Tsumkwe, Namibia for a little while a few years ago. Bigwig anthropologist John Marshall was staying in the same place, and after a few drinks we would get into some lively debates. It’s near impossible to legislate fair land use policies to help maintain “the hunter gatherer lifestyle.” Most of the Bushmen themselves would rather herd cattle and dig boreholes (wells) and go to school than to try to survive within the traditional means, especially when land has been roped and barbed-wired off so that they’re expected to live on a tiny fraction of the land they once traveled across. The lifestyle is unsustainable. Still, our romantic notions of The Gods Must Be Crazy’s “simpler way of life are hard to rid ourselves of.
The same could be said of Malawi and Bangladesh—it seems antithetical to my every hippie romantic notion that sweatshop work could be preferable to subsistence farming. My friends at Students against Sweatshops would loathe to hear him say it, but it’s hard to argue with Jeff Sachs when he says that to demand these “apparel firms” raise wages would be “a ticket back to rural misery.”
He also brings up remittances as an important step on the way to economic self sufficiency. Henry and I are thinking of putting a show together on this topic.
Counterpoint: This American Life did a piece a while back about the Cambodian government trying to institute their own fair labor practices in the garment industry as a country: search the TAL archives for “David and Goliath” and take a listen.
Posted by Greta Pemberton at March 14, 2006 12:43 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.watsonblogs.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/355