In response to '90s scandals through the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse, points made by leading economists and journalists including Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times .
Economist Jeffrey Sachs, speaking at a Harvard debate in 1997.
"Those are precisely the jobs that were the steppingstone for Singapore and Hong Kong, and are the jobs that have to come to Africa [and the rest of the Third World] to get them out of their backbreaking rural poverty.''
In a 1997 Slate piece, Paul Krugman blasts the anti-sweatshop movement.
"You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be helped with foreign aid? Maybe — although the historical record of regions like southern Italy suggests that such aid has a tendency to promote perpetual dependence. Anyway, there isn't the slightest prospect of significant aid materializing.
"Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of course — but they won't, or at least not because we tell them to. And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard — that is, the fact that you don't like the idea of workers being paid a pittance to supply rich Westerners with fashion items."
Via: aninews.in
In a 2009 New York Times op-ed, Nicholas Kristof presents a pro-sweatshop argument.
"While it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don't exploit enough.
"Talk to these families in the dumps [of Phnom Penh, Cambodia], and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children.
"I'd love to get a job in a factory," said Pim Srey Rath, a 19-year-old woman scavenging for plastic. "At least that work is in the shade. Here is where it's hot."
Kristof doubled-down on his stance in a follow-up column, after consternation in response to his first.
"My point is that bad as sweatshops are, the alternatives are worse. They are more dangerous, lower-paying and more degrading. And when I struggle to think how we can really make a big difference in the development of the poorest countries, the key always seems to be manufacturing."
