Helping = More Options

Ben, that article by Krugman is great! (Now there's a line I never imagined typing...)
Not only does he provide easy-to-understand examples, he refutes one by one, the usual arguments of the anti-sweatshop crowd. Arguments which I will now shamelessly present as my own at the next lefty cocktail party I'm forced to endure.

This just isn't that complicated. The problem lies with the ease with which capital can move to locations of absolute advantage, which nearly always means places with the lowest labor costs. If the capital invested in the sweatshop were forced to remain in the same country then raising labor standards would actually help people. Will's point should be that those who are agitating for higher labor standards should also be agitating for the institution of capital controls, but I assume that impinging on the precious freedom of capital is one of the prime libertarian heresies. The fact that many who are calling for higher labor standards are missing the capital flight side of the equation might make them less effective, but it doesn't make them hypocrites.

I know, it's not as fun as hating on dirty hippies, but there it is. Let (capital) freedom ring!

If the capital invested in the sweatshop were forced to remain in the same country then raising labor standards would actually help people.

if only the Berlin Wall had been about sweatshops!

Some evidence, please? It's one thing to appeal to economic theory that says that labor activists _may_ be unintentionally eliminating good job opportunities for poor people, another to demonstrate that such things are actually happening. Come on--basic social science here.

Freddie-

The question is, why is having people not work in sweatshops a moral imperative for those of us articulating a more moral and free world? Shouldn't people's actual living and working conditions be more of an imperative than any blanket statements about how people work? If the only way we can prevent people from working in sweatshops is by shutting those sweatshops down, and we do so without providing them with better options, how are we improving their working and living conditions?

You mention genocide, which we can all state our strong moral opposition too, but even genocide is a moral issue without any easy solutions. Actual policy- what we actually do- tends to be very far removed from strong statements about moral imperatives.

Will and everyone else, you all might enjoy this "Ethics Bites" podcast discussion between Janet Radcliffe Richards and David Edmonds about markets in human organs. There aren't any facts presented that you haven't heard before, I'm sure, but the ~20 minute discussion is so interesting because Edmonds resists Richards pro-market conclusion at every turn, but she ultimately nails the argument by characterizing the anti-market position as being more concerned with our squeamish sentiments than with helping the worst-off. It's really admirable rhetorical work.

http://media.open2.net/ethics-bites/organ_trans...

Because that's not good enough. You are, in essence, criticizing anyone who refuses to settle for not bad, or good enough. If we are in the business of articulating for a more moral and free world at all, then there's no difference between saying "people should not work in sweatshops" and saying "we should try to limit genocide." Each is a statement of conscience and is motivated by people's genuinely formed moral imperatives. And while in any individual instance the push to close sweatshops may be naive and counterproductive, the statement "we should endeavor to have safe, healthy and fair working environments" is not, I think, something anyone needs to apologize for. You might say that in every case, the option is sweatshop conditions or living on the trash heap. But that kind of categorical statement is generally a mark of ideological immaturity and unseriousness.

Also, I think there's a neat little turn in here which should be instructive to libertarians-- the boss is also coercive. As Matt and Will suggest, there is often no option but to work under poor conditions or starve. So becoming employment isn't, actually, always a moment of sublime Ayn Rand-liberty and is instead an act of submitting to coercion. You say you're baffled by people who don't want sweatshop conditions; I'm baffled by people who advocate trading the yoke of the government for the yoke of the boss and say that they are champions of liberty.

This is bad stuff. In regards your first paragraph, who's showing their "mark of ideological immaturity"? If your statement about working conditions leads, in practice, to a decrease in someone else's standards of living by means of crappy--read: driven by ideological immaturity--legislation, then, absolutely, you should be apologizing for it. Your "genuinely formed moral imperative" cost someone else some much needed cash. It is Will's point precisely that this kind of self-righteous moral-imperative-forming makes itself morally unassailable--because why should I apologize for having such lofty moral standards--and completely irresponsible--why should I be held accountable for the imperfections of the world?!?

Your second paragraph makes no sense. You mix like four different arguments, but toss in an Ayn Rand reference, which I suppose is supposed to reveal us as high-school-level philosophy retards, but whatever. Yes, the existence of incredible poverty in the world means libertarianism is morally bankrupt.

Talk is cheap. Unless you have a concrete plan that would actually work as to how to provide better working conditions, expressing one's moral position is idle.

This article by Krugman is illustrative of the problems with trying to shut down or skip the sweatshop phase in development: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html.

-->Why is this argument always "poor people should be able to work in sweatshops" vs. "sweatshops should be illegal", instead of "people working in sweatshops should have 30 minute lunch breaks" vs. "people working in sweatshops should have 10 minute lunch breaks"?<--

The argument against forced 30 minute lunch breaks (as opposed to voluntarily agreed upon 10 minute lunch breaks) is the same as banning vs not banning. In both cases you are taking away the best options as perceived by the workers in place. If the workers wanted to sacrifice the additional income they would have earned those 20 minutes by taking longer lunches, then 30 minute lunch breaks are what the companies would have found most profitable to provide.

Fiddling with lunch break rules is not as bad for the workers as banning altogether. But it's still not good.

I think it's easy for people to recognize things they don't like and to argue against them. Then, it's convenient to imagine that once that option is gone people will just sacrifice in the direction of the imaginer's preference, rather than the person's best option.

You see this with minimum wage arguments, too. People imagine that employers will just eat the difference and pay the same number of workers more, rather than seek alternatives with better profit margins.

I think it's just human nature. It's not fun to dwell on the problems with your own theory.

1) You would like to help distant strangers, or at least not harm them.

2) You would like people you know to think of you as the sort of person who helps distant strangers.

Sometimes these goals conflict.

If you say "Ban sweatshops!" it helps goal number 2, even though it harms goal number 1. Since one person you want to believe in your altruism is yourself, you can deal with this contradiction is by keeping yourself ignorant of actual consequences.

Alex nails it with #2. This is all about signaling that you are a nice person who cares about others, but in a way that doesn't actually discomfort you. So we run around creating elaborate "policy structure" and "political opinions" on which we don't act at all:

"If our far thoughts are more distorted to present good images, then the next step down the rabbit hole is this: to judge how we will typically act, others should prefer to see our near thoughts, at least if they can distinguish near versus far thoughts. After all, near thoughts drive most day to day actions. And we should each look more to our own near thoughts to judge our own sincerity.

Once we evolved to weigh near others' thoughts more heavily, the next step would be to look for cheap ways to have good-looking near-thoughts, without paying the full price of distorting important actions. That is, our mind designer would look for ways to show "detached" near thoughts, consistent with good-image far-thoughts, but not actually impacting much on important near decisions. This could be accomplished by vivid engaging detail that can clearly occupy our near thought systems, but which isn't much connected to substantial personal decisions. "

-- Beware Detached Detail

Why is this argument always "poor people should be able to work in sweatshops" vs. "sweatshops should be illegal", instead of "people working in sweatshops should have 30 minute lunch breaks" vs. "people working in sweatshops should have 10 minute lunch breaks"?

Oh, wait, I know. It's because the latter argument, which could actually have some effect on the world, would be really difficult and would require both sides to develop arguments somewhat more subtle than the whole exploitation vs. free-choice ideas that dominate this debate.

The reason is quite simple.

Suppose you have a labor-intensive factory with a hundred workers that manages to make a tiny profit offering ten minute lunch breaks Ghana. Given how competitive international markets are, this is not an unlikely situation - competition is strong, and there is very little money to be made off destitute Ghanians anyways (although there is plenty of money to be made fleecing the Stuff White People Like crowd with Ghanian products).

Now let's suppose some SWPL activist causes half-hour lunch breaks to be mandatory. As a result, this labor-intensive Ghanian factory is no longer profitable, because this means half-hour lunch breaks for hundred of Ghanian workers - hundreds of lunch breaks.

All of a sudden, it becomes cheaper to shut down the Ghanian factory, and replace those goods with products made in a ten-person Mexican factory that has roads, power, internet, and a CNC machine. Ten lunch breaks are cheaper than a hundred.

Why? Because when you increase the cost of labor, people substitute capital.

Will should have said "sex work," but Sanjay and William, please read: http://www.nodo50.org/Laura_Agustin/susie-brigh...

Thanks for the link, Kerry. I should have suspected that the situation was over-hyped by those who are determined to view poor people always as helpless victims.

I'm afraid the argument is going to have little traction with people who believe that sex work is fundamentally different from any other type of work and inherently exploitative, but I guess it's unreasonable to ask you to come up with an argument that would convince people who refuse to be believe that prostitutes are free people.

Yeah, what William said. Or at least, I really, _really_ don't grasp why you think activists are wrong to oppose human trafficking: most of the cases I'm aware of, and certainly the ones activists try to focus attention on, aren't about "options," they're about people backed into situations they didn't realize they were signing up for, and effectively jailed by the threat of violence. Worse, it often happens when people get trapped in (say) sexual slavery right here in this or another rich country. It seems like what we generally mean when we talk about human trafficking, isn't really in the kind of domain as the sweatshop thing. I mean. c'mon, Will, are you going to back recruitment of child soldiers next as an option for the poor?

The issue of human trafficking is overblown. Yes, it exists, and is wrong, insofar as it is coercive and harmful. And yes, there is certainly anecdotal evidence that it occurs. The problem is the statistical aggregate described by the term "human trafficking" is often bogus, and includes non-coercive, non-harmful cases of (often illegal) labor mobility lumped in with the coercive, harmful kind.

This is one of Kerry Howley's frequent topics of inquiry. Here she writes:

I’m inclined to see the hugely exaggerated statistics regarding human trafficking as driven by economic realities; sex slavery, thanks to evangelicals domestically and other social forces abroad, is where the money is. No one–least of all an NGO vying for that money–has an incentive to suggest that there are fewer victims than previously believed, or that the data suggests very few victims of trafficking are women sold into sex as opposed to men and boys forced into less titillating forms of labor; correct the misperception and you may shut off the tap. But clearly, there has to be some deeper will to believe among those who continue to parrot the now-discredited numbers.

In that same post she cites this Washington Post article:

Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence
U.S. Estimates Thousands of Victims, But Efforts to Find Them Fall Short

And the money quote:

Ronald Weitzer, a criminologist at George Washington University and an expert on sex trafficking, said that trafficking is a hidden crime whose victims often fear coming forward. He said that might account for some of the disparity in the numbers, but only a small amount.

"The discrepancy between the alleged number of victims per year and the number of cases they've been able to make is so huge that it's got to raise major questions," Weitzer said. "It suggests that this problem is being blown way out of proportion."

[...]

Although there have been several estimates over the years, the number that helped fuel the congressional response -- 50,000 victims a year -- was an unscientific estimate by a CIA analyst who relied mainly on clippings from foreign newspapers, according to government sources who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the agency's methods. Former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales told Congress last year that a much lower estimate in 2004 -- 14,500 to 17,500 a year -- might also have been overstated.

Also, the issue of human trafficking is closely tied to the issue of sex work, and so there are lots of biases and assumptions that predictably go along with any discussion of trafficking. For example, Howley often cites Laura María Agustín,

a sociologist who studies migrant sex workers. In her writings, she is critical of the conflation of the terms "human trafficking" with "prostitution" and "migration", arguing that what she calls the "rescue industry" often ascribes victim status to and thereby objectifies women who have made conscious and rational decisions to migrate. She advocates for a more nuanced study of migrant sex workers without pre-conceived notions.

Kerry interviewed Agustín for Reason here, in The Myth of the Migrant.

Kerry excerpts a piece by Agustín on the gender biases coloring our view of human trafficking here:

Single men’s decisions to travel are generally understood to evolve over time, the product of their ‘normal’ masculine ambition to get ahead through work: they are called migrants. Then there is the case of women who attempt to do the same…

It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work. But so entrenched is the idea of women as forming an essential part of home if not actually being it themselves that they are routinely denied the agency to undertake a migration. So begins a pathetic image of innocent women torn from their homes, coerced into migrating, if not actually shanghaied or sold into slavery. This is the imagery that nowadays follows those who migrate to places where the only paid occupations available to them are in domestic service or sex work.[3] The ‘trafficking’ discourse relies on the assumption that it is better for women to stay at home rather than leave it and get into trouble; ‘trouble’ is seen as something that will irreparably damage women (who are grouped with children), while men are routinely expected to encounter and overcome it. But if one of our goals is to find a vision of globalisation in which poorer people are not constructed solely as victims, we need to recognise that strategies which seem less gratifying to some people may be successfully utilised by others.

To sound the left-libertarian note, this is yet another case where patriarchal "traditional" cultural values about the proper role of women and the moral legitimacy of sex work leads to unlibertarian conclusions: millions of dollars wasted, mostly by governments, on essentially an urban legend popularized and believed by prudish traditionalists.

The issue of human trafficking is overblown. Yes, it exists, and is wrong, insofar as it is coercive and harmful. And yes, there is certainly anecdotal evidence that it occurs. The problem is the statistical aggregate described by the term "human trafficking" is often bogus, and includes non-coercive, non-harmful cases of (often illegal) labor mobility lumped in with the coercive, harmful kind.

This is one of Kerry Howley's frequent topics of inquiry. Here she writes:

I’m inclined to see the hugely exaggerated statistics regarding human trafficking as driven by economic realities; sex slavery, thanks to evangelicals domestically and other social forces abroad, is where the money is. No one–least of all an NGO vying for that money–has an incentive to suggest that there are fewer victims than previously believed, or that the data suggests very few victims of trafficking are women sold into sex as opposed to men and boys forced into less titillating forms of labor; correct the misperception and you may shut off the tap. But clearly, there has to be some deeper will to believe among those who continue to parrot the now-discredited numbers.

In that same post she cites this Washington Post article:

Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence
U.S. Estimates Thousands of Victims, But Efforts to Find Them Fall Short

And the money quote:

Ronald Weitzer, a criminologist at George Washington University and an expert on sex trafficking, said that trafficking is a hidden crime whose victims often fear coming forward. He said that might account for some of the disparity in the numbers, but only a small amount.

"The discrepancy between the alleged number of victims per year and the number of cases they've been able to make is so huge that it's got to raise major questions," Weitzer said. "It suggests that this problem is being blown way out of proportion."

[...]

Although there have been several estimates over the years, the number that helped fuel the congressional response -- 50,000 victims a year -- was an unscientific estimate by a CIA analyst who relied mainly on clippings from foreign newspapers, according to government sources who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the agency's methods. Former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales told Congress last year that a much lower estimate in 2004 -- 14,500 to 17,500 a year -- might also have been overstated.

Also, the issue of human trafficking is closely tied to the issue of sex work, and so there are lots of biases and assumptions that predictably go along with any discussion of trafficking. For example, Howley often cites Laura María Agustín,

a sociologist who studies migrant sex workers. In her writings, she is critical of the conflation of the terms "human trafficking" with "prostitution" and "migration", arguing that what she calls the "rescue industry" often ascribes victim status to and thereby objectifies women who have made conscious and rational decisions to migrate. She advocates for a more nuanced study of migrant sex workers without pre-conceived notions.

Kerry interviewed Agustín for Reason here, in The Myth of the Migrant.

Kerry excerpts a piece by Agustín on the gender biases coloring our view of human trafficking here:

Single men’s decisions to travel are generally understood to evolve over time, the product of their ‘normal’ masculine ambition to get ahead through work: they are called migrants. Then there is the case of women who attempt to do the same…

It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work. But so entrenched is the idea of women as forming an essential part of home if not actually being it themselves that they are routinely denied the agency to undertake a migration. So begins a pathetic image of innocent women torn from their homes, coerced into migrating, if not actually shanghaied or sold into slavery. This is the imagery that nowadays follows those who migrate to places where the only paid occupations available to them are in domestic service or sex work.[3] The ‘trafficking’ discourse relies on the assumption that it is better for women to stay at home rather than leave it and get into trouble; ‘trouble’ is seen as something that will irreparably damage women (who are grouped with children), while men are routinely expected to encounter and overcome it. But if one of our goals is to find a vision of globalisation in which poorer people are not constructed solely as victims, we need to recognise that strategies which seem less gratifying to some people may be successfully utilised by others.

To sound the left-libertarian note, this is yet another case where patriarchal "traditional" cultural values about the proper role of women and the moral legitimacy of sex work leads to unlibertarian conclusions: millions of dollars wasted, mostly by governments, on essentially an urban legend popularized and believed by prudish traditionalists.

I am always puzzled as to why this point isn't more persuasive. So how do you respond to the usual reply to this argument, which runs something like

"Well, obviously, banning sweatshops alone wouldn't do anything, we have to advocate for higher labor standards in sweatshops. Don't tell me multinational corporations can't afford to pay their workers more. They make so much profit!"

Also I don't think I understand your point about human trafficking. The conventional story on that seems to be that it involves both fraud (to get children away from their parents) and coercion (forcing the children to stay). Maybe the alternatives are still worse, but the point is a lot murkier than people who choose to work in sweatshops.

If you read Kristof's article you might see a retort to the quoted statement. If the labor standards go up, the jobs multinationals provide will move to more well off nations with the infrastructure to make manufacturing more effective (reliable power grid, efficiently run ports etc.). So by adding labor standards to the multinationals it will not increase the wages in the nations where sweatshops currently function but will move those jobs out of impoverished nations to nations that are already well off. There will not be better jobs to replace the lost jobs but worse jobs and unemployment. So I think banning sweatshops does nothing good, increasing protections on fraud and coercion, as you bring up in your last paragraph, is a needed step and labor policies on trade the work to end those things would be good and are needed. But when many politicians, pundits and "intellectuals" usually talk about "fair" trade it usually amounts to protectionism, which I would consider an act of economic warfare by prosperous nations on impoverished nations.

Yeah, that's the reply I usually use, though I hadn't seen before the point about workers having to bribe managers in order to get a job in factories with higher standards. It strikes me as a really good reply, but it doesn't seem very effective.

I think the problem is that most people who argue for better labor standards believe that the market for manufactured goods is not very competitive, and that there are actually significant monopoly rents to be divided up. Thus these people don't believe that factory owners would really move to a different country if, say, wages were doubled, because they would still be making a profit at a higher wage. We would just need to make sure that the corporations couldn't just move to another country and exploit those workers.

On that point, I think another problem we face is that there is generally some confusion about what role we are supposed to be playing in this discussion. Okay, maybe we can convince people that legislation banning sweatshops won't have a positive effect. However, if we're the corporation that owns the factory, shouldn't we decide to stay in a country and give our workers better wages and labor standards? As consumers, shouldn't we be buying from companies that pay their workers a "fair wage"?

As long as people believe that there are monopoly profits to be distributed, they aren't going to buy the argument that corporations can't simply choose to give their workers a higher wage, if they want to.

Uh-oh, I'm starting to believe my own bulls---. But I think Will's earlier post was right, saying that the real problem is nationalism and the "club mentality" that creates these rents in the first place. In other words, I think we are too complacent about sweatshops, because we ignore the role government had in creating them in the first place. So-called "free trade" deals which use the power of government to create monopoly rents are a terrible injustice, but once the deal is in place, why should we make sure that all the rents only go to (for lack of a better word) the Capitalists?