Nmherman on Sat, 26 May 2001 21:06:53 +0200 (CEST)


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[Nettime-bold] Fwd: G2000Conf2000 This is what we are up against 

 


I found this on the internet--notice the CV on this bastard; the Hoover Institute is a very well financed right-wing think tank. Their corporate-financed budget allows them way more resources than even the most  well-financed indy media and progressive media outlets. Notice where he teaches--it's important to make sure Navy brass is completely down with the idealogy. Maybe Max and I and other "credentialed" academics should demand that we be allowed to teach Genius2000 type ideas at military colleges.

To most people on this list, this essay will read like a self-serving bunch of sophistry. But it's important to remember that this will sound convincing to a lot of people. In fact, I've had folks ask me: "Well, don't those people need those jobs? Shouldn't we leave them alone and let them work for 29 cents an hour, so they can at least afford a little bit of rice and the cooking fuel to operate their little tin stoves?"

Of course, notice that Henderson offers no explanation of WHY the countries where these sweatshops are operated are poor. The fact that he starts by quoting a woman in Nicaragua is especially vulgar--it's not even possible to speculate about what the Nicaraguan economy might look like if it hadn't been battered by a hundred plus years of economic exploitation and military assault from the North. There are many quick reasons that can be listed which explain the poverty of people in the countries of Latin America, Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, and a few of them are: IMF policies that force the government to privatize land that might be better used for sustainable agriculture; "free" trade policies that force those countries to open their markets to massive amounts of grain, cheaply produced because it is subsidized by rich governments in the US and Western Europe; reckless deregulation of the international currency markets during 
the last ten to twenty years has crippled numerous economies.

Behind all of this is the legacy of hundreds of years of brutal colonial exploitation. When the colonial system began to break down, the US government played point at making sure that no country would be allowed to create their own, economically just system of government. William Blum's KILLING HOPE details hundreds of examples of the US using either covert or open force against democratically elected governments that had expressed deep committment to social justice. The Commandant of the Marine Corps during the first twenty years of the last century once said after he had retired that he had been no more than a hired thug for the economic elite (now you can see why it is so important that people like Henderson teach at the post-graduate Naval academy--that's where future Marine Commadants go to school.) 

And let's pretend that the poor people in third world countries really are poor through no fault of the US and Western Europe. Let's pretend it has nothing to do with corporate imperialism. I still don't think you have to be a bleeding heart wussy to believe that it's just not fucking right to exploit desperate people, just because "they don't have any other options." The price of sewing a pair of Nike sneakers is something like 1% of the actual cost. Workers in sweat shops could have their wages raised four-fold and the corporations employing them would still be able to maintain huge profits. Henderson's essay says nothing about why it is ethically okay for corporations to move their factories to the poorest places possible, and then pay the people the lowest wages possible, until they manage to locate an even poorest country, where they will be able to pay even lower wages. At a clean clothes campaign meeting, I saw two slides from an ad in an industry publication, taken a y!
!
!
ear apart--it showed a woman at a sewing machine and in the first one, it said "Come to country such and such and get Maria to work for you for 54 cents an hour" the next year said "Come to country such and such and get Maria for 32 cents an hour." And of course Henderson mentions nothing about the effect sweatshop labor has on labor standards here at home.




The Case for Sweatshops 
                                    by David R. Henderson 


                  

  David R. Henderson is
  a research fellow at
  the Hoover Institution
  and an economics
  professor at the Naval
  Postgraduate School
  in Monterey,
  California.
                     Candida Rosa Lopez, an employee in a Nicaraguan garment factory, works
                     long hours over a sewing machine at less than a dollar an hour. Interviewed
                     recently by a Miami Herald reporter, Ms. Lopez has a message for people in
                     the United States and other wealthy countries who are nervous about buying
                     goods from "sweatshops": "I wish more people would buy the clothes we
                     make."

                     Contrary to what you have heard, sweatshops in third-world countries are a
                     good deal for the people who work in them. Why? Because work, other than
                     slave labor, is an exchange. A worker chooses a particular job because she
                     thinks herself better off in that job than at her next-best alternative. Most of us
                     would regard a low-paying job in Nicaragua or Honduras as a lousy job. But
                     we're not being asked to take those jobs. Those jobs are the best options
                     those workers have, or else they would quit and work elsewhere. You don't
                     make someone better off by taking away the best of a bunch of bad choices.

                     Many workers in third-world sweatshops have left even harder, lower-paying
                     jobs in agriculture to move to garment factories. Moreover, sweatshops are a
                     normal step in economic development. Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea,
                     and Hong Kong all had sweatshop jobs thirty years ago. They don't now
                     because workers in those countries have acquired skills and employers have
                     accumulated capital. That's what will happen in Honduras, Nicaragua, and
                     other poor countries—if we only let it.

                     What happens when people persuade companies not to hire children to work
                     long hours? Oxfam, the British charity, reported that when factory owners in
                     Bangladesh were pressured to fire child laborers, thousands of the children
                     became prostitutes or starved. 

                     Yet the National Labor Committee's executive director, Charles Kernaghan,
                     goes around the country attacking sweatshops and trying to put legal barriers
                     in the way of people buying from sweatshops. Robert Reich, former U.S.
                     labor secretary under President Clinton, pressured Reebok International and
                     Sears Roebuck to get ShinWon, their South Korean subcontractor in
                     Honduras, to lay off fifty teenage girls. He apparently did not ask, or care,
                     what happened to them after they lost their jobs. Why are Kernaghan and
                     Reich hurting the people they claim to care about? Simple. The people they
                     really care about are unionized garment workers in the United States; the
                     NLC is funded by U.S. unions. The garment workers lost on NAFTA and
                     lost on GATT. This is their last-ditch effort to prevent foreign competition.

                     The next time you feel guilty for buying clothes made in a third-world
                     sweatshop, remember this: you're helping the workers who made that
                     clothing. The people who should feel guilty are those who argue against, or
                     use legislation to prevent us, giving a boost up the economic ladder to
                     members of the human race unlucky enough to have been born in a poor
                     country. Someone who intentionally gets you fired is not your friend.

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