if only the Berlin Wall had been about sweatshops!

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

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.

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.

“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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?