A Response to Weronika
(Weronika, Please note that what follows is not in any way a personal attack on you or your company. It started out as a response to your comments and gradually became a more general attempt to clarify my thoughts on the subject of outsourcing, sweatshops and humane working conditions.)
This post is a response to the comments made by Weronika Cwir, an American Apparel employee who made a couple of comments regarding my previous post In Praise of Sweatshops. It was simply too long to publish as a comment so I decided to make it a full post. It may help to read the initial comment thread first.
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"The hope is that as consumers become more educated about this, they won't just assume that "Made in USA" automatically means "made in humane conditions." (Often it doesn't.)"
"...there is a greater incentive and greater ability to treat manual workers well when they are your employees and not your contractor's employees. That's why if I were an owner of an apparel company, I would not outsource, especially if I wanted to create a product with "made under humane conditions" appeal. Or if I just wanted to sleep at night."
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If an employer doesn't like the way a contractor treats their employees then he can choose to go with someone else. And yes, I agree that outsourcing can be a nightmare when it comes to controlling processes and quality, but the concept of vertical integration vs. outsourcing is not what's in question here. What I am talking about is the prevalent idea that things made overseas (or as you assert above, at certain "inhumane" American companies) are made by wage slaves who are forced against their will to work in poor conditions because selfish people in America are willing to buy the cheap stuff they make, and that if people stopped buying it, they would somehow no longer be "exploited."
(Aside from the fact that "humane" or "inhumane" working conditions are very vague and arbitrary terms,) what irks me about the whole "down with sweatshops" and up with "humane working conditions" movement is that it's made up of rich white kids who have life handed to them on a platter not realizing that the only reason they can live like they do is because they (their parents really) have access to massive amounts of capital that was accumulated over hundreds of years prior to their birth.
It is capital accumulation that causes wages to rise, period. Workers with access to more capital are more productive and therefore are paid more than those without. This is why manual labor is always a low paying affair. It's not very productive.
Refusing to buy products that you would otherwise buy simply because you feel the products were not made in "humane conditions" is counterproductive. (Keep in mind that we are speaking here of voluntary employment, not children being sold into slavery, etc.) Let's take the example of a factory with poor working conditions and low wages in a poor country. Why do people work there? Who makes them?
They work there because they perceive that it is their best option. If that company goes under because people want to help the workers by not buying the product of their supposedly "exploited" labor, then they will be forced to take the next best option, which is often prostitution, begging, theft or a factory with even worse conditions and lower wages. There is no quick fix. Attempts to sidestep natural market processes are detrimental to the very people they are supposed to help.
What is occurring (or trying to occur, despite many comparatively wealthy people's best efforts to thwart it,) in third world nations is the natural process of capital accumulation or what we call "industrialization." It's exactly what Europe and America went through during their respective industrial revolutions (you know, when children and adults worked 14 hour days in steamy factories making textiles) and it is a necessary step. It cannot be skipped. Capital must be accumulated gradually and as it does, real wages and living standards will rise.
Government cannot do this. It was not government regulation that brought America and Europe out of agricultural squalor and early industrial toil. It was capital accumulation. The anti-sweatshop movement seeks to thwart that process. Aside from their harmful boycotts, they often also seek for government intervention, wage laws, union legislation and progressive taxes on corporations and the wealthy people who own them. This is precisely what stifles economies, kills the process of capital accumulation and keeps poor countries perpetually poor.
This is the essence of the NY Times article I cited and is what I am ranting against when I talk about the anti-sweatshop movement. The conditions that millions of people around the world live and work in are, to us, truly tragic. But keep in mind that the entire world's population has lived in worse conditions throughout all of history. It was the industrial revolution and the prolific amounts of accumulated capital that it made possible that finally produced the lavish lifestyle we enjoy now.
We cannot just give our standard of living away to poorer countries. No amount of wishing, praying, crying, picketing or legislating can bring it about. Denying people in poor countries the right to work at what we consider low paying and "inhumane" jobs (by refusing to buy what they make) is to forever deny them and their children a chance at something better in the future. This is a hard fact of life but one that must not be ignored.
And developing countries aren't the only ones with problems. America and Europe are in trouble. Since their initial heyday of relatively unfettered capitalism, they have gone a long way towards halting capital accumulation and have begun the process of capital consumption. This will mean lower future living standards in both real and relative terms. Unions, social legislation, progressive taxes, relentless inflation and ungodly amounts of debt are the culprits. Hence the West's standard of living is stagnating and wages in many industries are holding or slightly falling while those in many developing countries are rising at double digit rates.
The lesson that should be (but probably will never be) learned is that markets work, and that if we want increasing living standards, especially for the poor in undeveloped countries, they must be allowed to work unhampered. Capitalism and the capital it is named for is the only real and lasting way out of the sweatshop and into the modern world.
This post is a response to the comments made by Weronika Cwir, an American Apparel employee who made a couple of comments regarding my previous post In Praise of Sweatshops. It was simply too long to publish as a comment so I decided to make it a full post. It may help to read the initial comment thread first.
-------------------
"The hope is that as consumers become more educated about this, they won't just assume that "Made in USA" automatically means "made in humane conditions." (Often it doesn't.)"
"...there is a greater incentive and greater ability to treat manual workers well when they are your employees and not your contractor's employees. That's why if I were an owner of an apparel company, I would not outsource, especially if I wanted to create a product with "made under humane conditions" appeal. Or if I just wanted to sleep at night."
-------------------
If an employer doesn't like the way a contractor treats their employees then he can choose to go with someone else. And yes, I agree that outsourcing can be a nightmare when it comes to controlling processes and quality, but the concept of vertical integration vs. outsourcing is not what's in question here. What I am talking about is the prevalent idea that things made overseas (or as you assert above, at certain "inhumane" American companies) are made by wage slaves who are forced against their will to work in poor conditions because selfish people in America are willing to buy the cheap stuff they make, and that if people stopped buying it, they would somehow no longer be "exploited."
(Aside from the fact that "humane" or "inhumane" working conditions are very vague and arbitrary terms,) what irks me about the whole "down with sweatshops" and up with "humane working conditions" movement is that it's made up of rich white kids who have life handed to them on a platter not realizing that the only reason they can live like they do is because they (their parents really) have access to massive amounts of capital that was accumulated over hundreds of years prior to their birth.
It is capital accumulation that causes wages to rise, period. Workers with access to more capital are more productive and therefore are paid more than those without. This is why manual labor is always a low paying affair. It's not very productive.
Refusing to buy products that you would otherwise buy simply because you feel the products were not made in "humane conditions" is counterproductive. (Keep in mind that we are speaking here of voluntary employment, not children being sold into slavery, etc.) Let's take the example of a factory with poor working conditions and low wages in a poor country. Why do people work there? Who makes them?
They work there because they perceive that it is their best option. If that company goes under because people want to help the workers by not buying the product of their supposedly "exploited" labor, then they will be forced to take the next best option, which is often prostitution, begging, theft or a factory with even worse conditions and lower wages. There is no quick fix. Attempts to sidestep natural market processes are detrimental to the very people they are supposed to help.
What is occurring (or trying to occur, despite many comparatively wealthy people's best efforts to thwart it,) in third world nations is the natural process of capital accumulation or what we call "industrialization." It's exactly what Europe and America went through during their respective industrial revolutions (you know, when children and adults worked 14 hour days in steamy factories making textiles) and it is a necessary step. It cannot be skipped. Capital must be accumulated gradually and as it does, real wages and living standards will rise.
Government cannot do this. It was not government regulation that brought America and Europe out of agricultural squalor and early industrial toil. It was capital accumulation. The anti-sweatshop movement seeks to thwart that process. Aside from their harmful boycotts, they often also seek for government intervention, wage laws, union legislation and progressive taxes on corporations and the wealthy people who own them. This is precisely what stifles economies, kills the process of capital accumulation and keeps poor countries perpetually poor.
This is the essence of the NY Times article I cited and is what I am ranting against when I talk about the anti-sweatshop movement. The conditions that millions of people around the world live and work in are, to us, truly tragic. But keep in mind that the entire world's population has lived in worse conditions throughout all of history. It was the industrial revolution and the prolific amounts of accumulated capital that it made possible that finally produced the lavish lifestyle we enjoy now.
We cannot just give our standard of living away to poorer countries. No amount of wishing, praying, crying, picketing or legislating can bring it about. Denying people in poor countries the right to work at what we consider low paying and "inhumane" jobs (by refusing to buy what they make) is to forever deny them and their children a chance at something better in the future. This is a hard fact of life but one that must not be ignored.
And developing countries aren't the only ones with problems. America and Europe are in trouble. Since their initial heyday of relatively unfettered capitalism, they have gone a long way towards halting capital accumulation and have begun the process of capital consumption. This will mean lower future living standards in both real and relative terms. Unions, social legislation, progressive taxes, relentless inflation and ungodly amounts of debt are the culprits. Hence the West's standard of living is stagnating and wages in many industries are holding or slightly falling while those in many developing countries are rising at double digit rates.
The lesson that should be (but probably will never be) learned is that markets work, and that if we want increasing living standards, especially for the poor in undeveloped countries, they must be allowed to work unhampered. Capitalism and the capital it is named for is the only real and lasting way out of the sweatshop and into the modern world.
posted by Aaron Singleton at 4:08 PM
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