Libertarians and market-anarchists often cite the non-aggression principle (no force, no fraud) when summarizing their philosophy, so I am always perplexed when I hear support for sweatshops in conversations with individuals who self-identify as libertarians or market anarchists. In fact, sweatshops, those citadels of cheap labor associated with laissez-faire capitalism and industrialization, perpetuate both force and fraud against the people employed there, and so they are incompatible with a free or libertarian society. By supporting this form of economic exploitation, many libertarians and market anarchists both undermine their philosophy and alienate potential supporters among the working class.
Sweatshops are generally considered to be factories or workshops in which employees, often children, work over nine to ten hours a day for wages that barely allow for the purchase of basic necessities. Furthermore, the working conditions at these factories or workshops are often considered to be hazardous or unsafe. Sweatshops do not provide their employees any benefits, such as health insurance or worker’s compensation, and employees do not enjoy any form of job security. Today, sweatshops can be found all over the world, but they are most common in developing nations, such as India, China, and Mexico.
Most arguments in favor of sweatshops, which are common to every socioeconomic theory (libertarian or otherwise), consist of two general propositions: “workers are better off in the sweatshop than they would have been otherwise,” and “no one forces them to work there.” Neo-liberal economist Paul Krugman (in)famously made those arguments in his 1997 article in Slate Magazine, “In Praise of Cheap Labor.” Responding to “self-righteous” critics, Krugman pointed out that working in a sweatshop in Manila for $20 a week is preferable to scrounging around a garbage dump for scrap metal or scratching out a living on a subsistence farm. “A policy of good jobs in principle, but no jobs in practice, might assuage our consciences, but it is no favor to its alleged beneficiaries,” he concluded.
These arguments are fallacious for two reasons: 1) They depend on a narrow definition of “force” and a generous interpretation of “choice,” and 2) They wrongly presuppose that sweatshops are the only alternative to bare subsistence in those economies.
If, borrowing a scenario posed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract, a thief were to hold you up at the edge of the woods and demand your purse, that would be an example of naked force and aggression. The thief offers you a choice: surrender your property or face injury or death. No reasonable person would argue that this is a fair choice, but as Rousseau pointed out, there is an element of choice—you could attempt to hide your purse, in which case you would no longer be compelled to hand it over. You could also simply refuse to surrender your purse, thus risking your life. The fact that you have these choices, however, certainly does not make the thief’s actions moral or legitimate.
Therefore, hopefully, we can agree that the practical application of the non-aggression principle means having freedom of action in the absence of force, which applies neither to the thief nor the sweatshop. A sweatshop does not arise as the result of men and women who agree to sell their labor in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Although no one holds a gun to the worker’s head, he or she is given a false choice between skeletal wages and dangerous working conditions and exposure and starvation. This arrangement and the thief in the woods are equivalent agents of aggression. Yes, you can choose not to work at the sweatshop, just like you could choose not to surrender your wallet to the thief, but this is not a fair and free choice because of the perception of self-preservation.
Perhaps the most revealing question to ask is this: If, with access to all the information about their industry, workers employed at sweatshops were able to decide the conditions of their labor, would they choose to continue to perpetuate their current condition? If the answer is “no,” then the exploitation of these workers is obvious. No human being, given a free and informed choice, would work under sweatshop conditions. Sweatshops can only exist under a lopsided arrangement, perpetuated by force and fraud, in which one party (the company) exploits ignorance and desperation to reap 90 percent of the benefits.
Any agreement between libertarians, market-anarchists, and neo-liberals like Paul Krugman on economics should be followed by some serious self-reflection, especially if that agreement relies on a false dichotomy and a distorted notion of choice. Even if sweatshops take advantage of and promote the notion that they are the only alternative to starvation, that is not the case. In a free market, workers – should they choose to enter into the field of manufacturing – have a wide variety of options, whether those factories are simply unionized, cooperatively owned, or based on individual agreements between a worker and the factory owner. In all of these situations, if all parties adhered to the non-aggression principle, the conditions that give rise to sweatshops would not exist.
It really bugs the crap out of me when people confuse Mercantilism with free market Capitalism.l
BWAAAAAAAH! Thank you for this Mr. Kleen
I have been called non-libertarian and numerous other disparaging epithets for pointing at the elephant in the room. Sweatshops are not a by product of a functioning free-market, regardless of what the "real libertarians" and conservatives say. Defending neoliberalism seems to be the favored past time of statists that happen to be ABCT adherents.
This is one of my pet peeves, for the record: http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2010/11/1…
I could try to explain this in economic terms, but it might be simpler to draw an analogy to free speech. When the ACLU defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois in a famous court case several years ago, the ACLU was not staking out a pro-Nazi position. Rather, by defending free speech on principle, the viability of the marketplace of ideas (that in practice produces results that run counter to Nazi sentiments) is strengthened.
I find it interesting that you would call Krugman a neo-liberal. As far as I can see, he's a Keynesian who supports the welfare state, though he holds some unorthodox views for a liberal (defense of sweatshops, criticism of minimum wage laws etc.). I'm not sure what his views on corporate globalization are, but on the whole he seems to be a regular liberal with slightly more positive views on capitalism, rather than a Chicago school, "what's good for GM" -type neo-liberal.
As far as sweatshops go (which are immoral, no doubt about it), Krugman is correct in asserting that they are "the best alternative" at the moment, assuming nobody was indeed forced to sign a contract – but that's only the obvious face of it. Libertarians should go one step further and reveal the alternatives that the state (in conjunction with corporations) is actively and passively removing from the table.
"A sweatshop does not arise as the result of men and women who agree to sell their labor in a mutually beneficial arrangement."
I see no barrier to what we'd call a sweatshop arising in exactly this way (unless what we're really talking about is slavery, and not sweatshop labour per se).
"Although no one holds a gun to the worker’s head, he or she is given a false choice between skeletal wages and dangerous working conditions and exposure and starvation. This arrangement and the thief in the woods are equivalent agents of aggression. Yes, you can choose not to work at the sweatshop, just like you could choose not to surrender your wallet to the thief, but this is not a fair and free choice because of the perception of self-preservation."
That doesn't work. The bandit is threatening the initiation of force, _that's_ how the NAP is violated. As long as the sweatshop boss is not threatening violence, or dealing fraudulently with the sellers of labour, he is not in violation of the NAP.
To me the following doesn't reasoning doesn't work as written either:
"Perhaps the most revealing question to ask is this: If, with access to all the information about their industry, workers employed at sweatshops were able to decide the conditions of their labor, would they choose to continue to perpetuate their current condition? If the answer is “no,” then the exploitation of these workers is obvious."
All trade is mutually exploitative. If something more specific is meant here it ought to be spelled out. The implication sounds to be that this sweatshop 'exploitation' is morally impermissible. But how can this reasoning be made to work without ruling out _all_ trade of labour? Surely all workers could think of something they'd change if they could wave a magic wand and 'decide the conditions of their labor', and so would choose against 'perpetuating their current condition'.
Michael,
This is an area of deep interest of mine. And I'm very sympathetic to left-libertarian concerns on it. However, I'm not sure that I'm persuaded by the argument you've made here. I certainly agree that if A interacts with B in a situation where A is threatening or employing force against B, then the transaction is morally suspect. Things seem trickier, though, when A interacts with B and some third-party C is threatening or applying force against B. Surely we can blame C for the unjust use of force. But can we fairly blame B for benefiting from that force? Even if he in no way causally contributed to it?
What's your take on the following scenario? C throws B in a pool of quicksand and leaves him to die. A wanders by and offers B a rope for a price of $1,000. Now, I personally find A's action here repugnant, and think there are good moral grounds for criticizing him. But I'm not clear what grounds a libertarian (especially one sought to base morality solely on a principle of non-aggression) would have for objecting to A's behavior.
I think most sweatshops are like A in this scenario. Maybe you disagree with that, and I'd be interested to here why. But I'd also be curious to hear what you think of the scenario, regardless of how well you think it maps on to actual cases of sweatshop labor.
Anyone who defends the practice of sweatshop labor needs to ask the question of what made the workers go to work there in the first place. If people are living a subsistence life, but nonetheless managing to eke out a life, why would they go to the sweatshop? Perhaps for dreams of a better life, but once there what keeps them there? Has their material condition improved any? If it did, then again, why do they continue to work in horrible conditions?
I think the answer to any of that is the "new feudalism". MegaloCorp approaches the government of the region and expresses their intention to civilize the natives. The government says, "hell yeah, kickbacks!". MegaloCorp proposes a new, yet substandard factory and demands tax breaks, perks, and the local government provide the suitable facilities in exchange for the increased GDP. The government says "sure", and displaces people to build the factory. To make up for the cost of the factory the government levies taxes. People that were previously able to subsist, now have to pay up or go to prison, at which time the rest of their families starve. So, they go to work in the only place that actually pays a wage (because prior to that most people didn't have much use for money anyway, but the government won't take eggs and hand-woven rugs as payment).
Of course, this is an over-simplification, but I don't imagine it's that far off from reality. It's not that far off from how the industrial revolution played out in England.
I would simply argue that Sweatshops MIGHT exist in a Free Market. However, the current existence of Sweatshops have nothing to do with the Free Market. Most (if not all) of the companies are given subsidies (either by their own country or the country they are entering) to set up shop in what is usually a State run economy (are there any other kinds that exist?) whereby the options are so limited that a Sweatshop is seen more as life raft (rather than a noose) to those accepting employment at these places. If we can get to the point that States and Corporations (in tandem) no longer can rig things such that the options are so limited the existence of a Sweatshop would be rare, if it existed at all. In other words, a truly freed market and not the Corporate State rigged Market that pretty much every citizen of every country suffers under.
Are Libertarians racist by not supporting the Civil Rights Act?
Rather than supporting or opposing sweatshops as such, one might wonder how it is that sweatshops exist in the first place. The answer is – the state. Absent subsidies to politically-connected cronies, artificial regulatory barriers to market entry by individuals and cooperatives, IP monopolies, destruction of the commons, etc., all actions of the state, wannabe sweatshop owners would have to compete with many more favorable alternatives for labor. How many sweatshops could survive under those conditions?
To argue that sweatshops are force is completely absurd. By no means are they ideal and they are of questionable morals, but it is truthful that they provide the best available alternative to subsistence farming. Eventually people will work together savings and build up enough experience as a collective and politically to get better wages and demand better working conditions.
Also, on the note of working conditions, employers are always liable for any damage they cause to workers. Thus, they have incentive to create at least a moderately safe environment.
Were the sweatshops in the 1880s subsidized as well?
"To argue that sweatshops are force is completely absurd. By no means are they ideal and they are of questionable morals, but it is truthful that they provide the best available alternative to subsistence farming."
You're right by jove!! I mean, who the fell would want to be a farmer? Especially when farrming looks like this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/vide…
in a freed market, people wouldn't assume that other people necessarily want a "best available alternative" to subsistence farming. in a freed market, people would have the choice to opt out of workerist, consumerist, alienated, industrial culture.
The entity that removes alternative livelihoods and creates the pressure to earn should perhaps be considered the guilty party. The voluntary sweatshop is the imperfect liferaft in this situation and does not violate the nap.
It is the regulatory state that removes alternatives such as simple self employment and generates pressure to earn through taxation and inflating living costs with coercive restrictions on land use. all states only permit a tiny fraction of land to be used for housing. this artificially inflates costs and thus the need to earn. for the state this has the handy effect of increasing tax receipts and for businesses it increases the pressure to work. this tilts the balance of any voluntary employer/employee relationship in favour of the employer.
legal protections are lacking due to a failure of the statist monopoly legal system. polycentric voluntary legal codes would offer better employee protection.
I consider sweatshops to be quite fine, the 'best available option' in many places. I also believe that we should lower trade barriers farther, since that would encourage more wage arbitrage, which would encourage more competition for workers, which would suppress sweatshops.
However, I want to point out that employers are not always liable for any damage they cause to workers. Employer liability like that is actually a job perk. It's nice when it's there – I'm not sure I'd ever want to work at a place that didn't offer it – but even in the western world not every business can guarantee full liability for damage to workers. Some jobs are just plain dangerous.
In the developing world, this (like many other perks) can be hard to find in a job.
While discussing this on Facebook, I responded to a question that came up:
"What I don't get is what the mechanism is supposed to be to make labor not exploitative if it isn't a state."
Understanding this is contingent upon understanding the reverse, what's going on systemically when labor exploitation does happen. To answer your question in one word: competition. What's being described as "labor exploitation" is the undue influence held by particular actors when there are monopsony/oligopsony conditions in the labor market, which in turn result from monopolization of capital, which in turn can only result from state intervention in the market.
When people take a seemingly bad deal because they have few other choices, it's not that offering them a bad deal is itself coercive but that only coercion can create the context in which that bad deal may be their only choice — at least, if we're talking about systematic patterns of social conflict.
Earlier in that same discussion on Facebook, another commenter said largely the same thing (in a simpler but less precise manner)…
"the only libertarians who really support sweat shops are the ones who have not seen that most of them are the product of land seizure and the massive elimination of alternatives through state force."
If I offer you $10/hr to do X is that 'sweatshop'? If I offer you $1/day to do Y is that 'sweatshop'? Where is the line and why does the line belong where YOU drew it? Shouldn't the line belong to those that accept the offer?
Why is Michael Kleen writing on C4SS? If you follow his columns, he is unapologetically a right winger, despises the left, and has a particular animosity toward anarchists. Note that in this article, he uses left-of-center Krugman as his foil…. why no mention of the horrifically pro-sweatshop right wingers, especially on C4SS which is again a leftist website? It's because he despises the left (read his articles… he writes glowingly of Pat Buchanan).
Look at his recent article on leftist Howard Zinn where Kleen doesn't analyze the content of Zinn's work, but instead attacks it as intentional propaganda mean to demoralize: http://www.strike-the-root.com/demoralization
Here is the best… how about his interview with Bay Area National Anarchist Andrew Yeoman? http://www.blackoakmedia.org/main/?currentPage=4 Yeoman is an unapologetic right wing racist (he even has a white power mentor, in classic white supremacist fashion) who labels himself an anarchist, but really uses the label merely for shock value. In the article, Kleen let's Yeoman seize the pulpit to discuss left-anarchist discrimination against right wing "anarchists," and doesn't challenge Yeoman's racist perspective. Why? Because Kleen tacitly agrees with this tripe.
Hell, note the cover of that issue of Kleen's magazine (http://www.blackoakmedia.org/main/?currentPage=4). He proudly advertises his softball interview with this bigot! I don't want to be associated with this guy, but Kleen doesn't seem to mind giving him voice.
Look, I am all for multiple approaches and discourses. But Kleen and his ilk are not our friends… Hell, Kleen makes no pretenses; leftists, anarchists and anti-statists are destructive to American civil society. Kleen is against the very movement that those gravitating toward C4SS prop up! Kleen is not C4SS material, and should take to anti-leftist blogs to post his tripe.
Please reconsider posting anything by Kleen. It only harms the Center's integrity. I wouldn't associate with the guy in social struggle nor in an online forum.
One of my issues with arguing that sweatshops are the better alternative is that they are only the better alternative if you like to have an abundance of cheap goodies and really like the current economic system. I mean, it's the best alternative for who? It's definitely better for someone like me who gets cheap clothes, cheap electronics, cheap tools, etc. Is it really better for the subsistence farmer who was essentially forced to leave her/his family so they can make just more than subsistence wages so that they can buy the food that they are no longer able to grow due to agribusiness teaming up with the government and mercenaries (much in the same way that the owners of the sweatshops did)?
I would rather be a subsistence farmer than work 13+ hours in a factory for a couple of bucks. Not to mention the fact that I can be fired for getting sick or attempting to unionize. But then again, the latter two aspects are already commonplace in the US and defended by some small government conservatives and libertarians.
Sweatshops, maquiladores, neo-slave jobs, etc are not good. They should be denounced by everyone.
You're right that libertarian freedom is narrower than existentialist freedom but I'm not sure that "Yes, you can choose not to work at the sweatshop, just like you could choose not to surrender your wallet to the thief, but this is not a fair and free choice because of the perception of self-preservation" quite follows. The thief is actively restricting the sphere of free action that the NAP claims you have but the guy running a sweatshop perhaps isn't, the worker is very poor regardless of whether the aweatshop even gets built. It's not the existence of a poor set of choices that constitutes aggression, it's what created the set that is the issue.
My recent post Positive-Negative Freedom – A False Dichotomy
To get a libertarian objection to work you would have to argue for one or more of the following propositions:
1. background NAP violations were responsible for the lack of choices available
2. some aspect of the NAP needs re-interpreting in a way that may not necessarily condone contracts made in the context of extreme poverty
3. there is more to freedom than the NAP and sweatshops can be opposed on these grounds instead
All of which I think are at least plausible ideas
My recent post Positive-Negative Freedom – A False Dichotomy
Also, there is the consequentialist argument that allowing sweatshops is the best way to raise wages in extremely poor countries. A response based on the NAP wouldn't answer that. It would need to be shown that sweatshops fail to raise a worker's marginal productivity and/or that some mechanism was preventing the tendency towards their pay becoming equal to their MP. I reckon the standard left-libertarian analysis could do the job though.
At any rate, I think everyone is agreed that sweatshops are something we would want to see ending in a free society.
PS – Is there anyway of allowing slightly longer comments?
My recent post Positive-Negative Freedom – A False Dichotomy
The more basic argument argument against sweatshops is against morally or ethically repugnant contracts in general. So called "Slave contracts", sometimes defended by libertarians, are the extreme example. Fair labor laws, child labor laws, minimum wage laws, anti-prostitution laws, etc., restrict the freedom of contract in order to prohibit morally repugnant commercial relationships.
For this exploitation to exist, an extremely unequal or impoverished condition must exist. This unfair condition might exist because of aggression, force or fraud, but may also exist through the operation of the nominal free market or due to accident. In this case the problem must be confronted as a broader moral issue not involving a narrow focus on "aggression, force or fraud".
What constitutes a "sweatshop"? Working 14 hours a day? 12 hours a day? 8 hours a day? One might as well declare that working more than 4 hours a day is exploitative. And what's a "fair" wage? $5.00 an hour? $10 an hour? $100 an hour? It's all subjective. While I agree that there are many government/big corporation deals in third world countries that cut out competition for workers that would help raise their wages, the word "sweatshop" is just an inflammatory term that has no objective meaning.
Well, if A had given C $100 to throw B in the quicksand, then…
Sweatshop owners don't just "wander" by and find people to exploit. They actively collude with the state to set up the conditions for exploitation.
Avoiding the sweatshop terminology, it's difficult to tell where or if there's a clear line saying the return from work must be so high to be consistent with a free market. But let's say there is. What is the anarchistic solution to such a situation? We're not talking about anyone forcing someone into the work place, only someone offering little for pay and a nasty working environment.
I am perfectly fine saying sweatshops are not immoral.
Except that we ARE talking about people been forced into a workplace. Or at the very least being forced into the situation where that have no other option but to 'choose' to do so. Sweatshops couldn't exist without state sponsored violence to enforce land confiscation and enclosure.
Why?
Okay but the source of the force is not within the sweatshop so again, I ask: What is the anarchistic solution? Attaching the sweatshop appears to be a weak response.
uh yes!
yes yes! How can people in the 3rd world be being exploited? THATS NOT HOW TEH FREE MARKET WORKS
if tis, must be *quite* fine…
the sweatshop in almost all concrete cases is colluding at every level with the government.
life raft?
This would presumably not be the case where the sweatshop companies are state-privileged corporations working with the government every step of the way to foster just such conditions
It really bugs the crap out of me when people confuse Mercantilism with free market Capitalism.l
"Free Market Capitalism" is an oxymoron. Capitalism (a system where ownership is divorced from labor, and in a large scale labor becomes subordinated to capital) would crumble in a free market. In a free society, the general mode of production would be more cooperative, rather than hierarchical.
no.
In a third world environment (poverty) some persons may appear to be working in a “sweatshop” but are actually self-employed and have no employees. For example, someone may be in the business of making bricks by digging up clay, shaping it, and baking it.
It may well be that there is not enough profit there to build a nice building with air conditioning and safety features. Instead, he works in an unsafe wooden shanty, no air conditioning or ventilation, extremely hot conditions, an unsafe oven or kiln, etc.
If this guy hires a friend or family member at an extraordinarily low wage (which may be what the owner makes as well) and there is no coercion (the employee may have begged to be hired), is the owner running a sweatshop?
There are people who live within minutes from me who might think I live in deplorable conditions. My working conditions in my home office might be considered substandard – no ergonomic chair.
It may be that to some degree, sweatshops are in the eye of the pampered suburban white middle-class observer. If there is no obvious coercion, slavery, threats of violence, etc., maybe one man’s sweatshop is another man’s dream job.
Anybody here seen the documentary called The Parking Lot Movie?
Libertarians turn off working- and middle-class people when they rhapsodize over the rich. How can someone be in favor of sweatshops and still say they love freedom when they espouse wage-slavery for others?
“I am perfectly fine saying sweatshops are not immoral.”
And I would be perfectly happy, Pizzly, if you were working in one.
The author is failing to apply the economic principle of "What is seen, what is unseen".
At every turn, the state facilitates the sweatshop's market position through extortion of the poor through currency debasement and taxation, national debt, land confiscation, barriers to entry such as licensure and regulation, an unjust and unfair legal framework causing a lack of property rights, market imbalances through subsidy, and political corruption. I'm sure the list is larger.
Arguing the ethics of 'sweatshoppery' is a red herring. The issue is what does the state do to those people that puts them in such an awful economic situation that makes them desperate enough to work in such conditions?
Without a state, naked aggression will be recognized for what it is, and chastized. With a state performing all the naked aggression, it concealed under an illusion of consequentialist goodness.
Violence exists in both social orders, but without a state, people see aggression for what it is; evil.
I am not prepared to say hiring workers to live in extremely poor conditions (subjective to myself) is a moral decision, but it is not coercive. It's simply not immoral, it is not something I feel is a universal "wrong."
If that's truly the case, then the sweatshop owners are aggressors. But isn't the burden of proof on the accuser? Are you stating, with complete confidence, that all "sweatshops" are run by colluders with the state? What's your evidence for that claim?
I understand anarcho-libertarian thought to be essentially political and economic in scope. It makes no claim to be a complete moral or spiritual code applicable to all human interaction, and it makes no promise to rectify all immoral practices or to remedy all repugnant conditions, such as “sweat shops” however we define them.
Just as we abstain from harming others, we are also free to help others. In a stateless society – that is, absent force-backed governments and incestuous corporations – we would be free as individuals to undertake charitable or humanitarian projects of our own choosing or creation, such as ameliorating bad working conditions, and we would be free, not to force of course, but to invite our fellows either to support or join our endeavor.
Finally, we must also remember that the intended recipients of our charity may or may not want our help are free to reject it. Many years of hard experience as a teacher and a counselor have taught me to be very cautious about extending unsolicited help. The zeal to fix other people’s problems too often causes more harm than good.
I would not chose to work in one. I have alternatives by my mere luck of being born where I am. If you feel sweatshops are bad, why would you wish for me to work in one?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/83…
"If, with access to all the information about their industry, workers employed at sweatshops were able to decide the conditions of their labor, would they choose to continue to perpetuate their current condition?" What information do you think they lack? People go into sweatshops because they lack alternatives not information. Yes in a free society capital would accumulate and diffuse rapidly putting upwards pressure on wages and conditions. That does not mean that those who provide the best alternatives in the absence of a free market are force or fraud. If I transport food to Palestinians through a tunnel the prices I charge aren't the result of my force or fraud. Sweatshops arise from an environment of force and fraud and are the best response to it. To eliminate them eliminate the force and fraud, the disease not the symptom.
Michael, you are completely wrong with your argument. The analogy is flawed, as others have commented. And it is certainly possible that, in a completely free world, sweatshops might exist. I'm sorry if that offends "liberal" sensibilities, but not all implications of freedom are pleasant to observe. That does not mean we should not want to be free.
Anyway, working in a sweatshop is not the end of the world. My wife worked in a Hong Kong sweatshop when she was 12. It didn't kill her; it just made her tougher.
It's the best alternative for the workers, otherwise why would they work there? Yes it's really better for the subsistence farmer who leaves his family. Subsistence farming is hard, the sweatshop owners probably like subsistence farmers because they're used to 13 hour days. What do you think happens to subsistence farmers who get too sick to work? No work, no food. As for unionisation, subsistence farmers can't really unionise, they're self-employed. You are confusing the theft of land with it's consequence, more people willing to work in sweatshops.
IMO left libertarians should consider Ellerman´s critique of the employer – employee relationship
http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Books/p&…
and decide on what side of the employer – employee divide they want to stay.
Better than what, IN THE FREE MARKET?
Mary, what do you mean by "working- and middle-class people"? Are the crowds who've been demonstrating in Madison and London representative of the people that you have in mind? How about the people toward whom those demonstrators are sympathetic (who tend to be taxfeeders and the beneficiaries of union rackets sponsored by government)? If so, it should be no suprise that they are turned off by libertarianism, for those people, the demonstrators and those with whom they sympathize, are basically just taxfeeders and thugs.
And what justification do you have for the accusation that libertarians "rhapsodize over the rich"? Where is there any rhapsodizing in Kleen's essay? Your compaint reads like a cheapshot.
Finally, I doubt that you even know what you're referring to when you say or write "libertarian". C4SS is an anarchist website. Its contempt for the ways and means of the superrich, who become that way through political entrepreneurship, is outspoken. Further, some who claim to be libertarians are statists to the core; others are anarchists. The equivocation in meaning is meaningful, to say the least.
Pizzly, double negatives. What you wrote earlier means:
"I am perfectly fine saying sweatshops are moral."
So you've made a postive claim about the world that you need to substantiate. How you'll do that is not clear given that "I [Pizzly] am not prepared to say hiring workers in extremely poor conditions (subjective to myself) is a moral decision".
Now, you may not have consciously intended to talk out of both sides of your mouth, but the double negative does not lie, for between A and not-A there is nothing.
The analogy is not exactly wrong. The others are not interpreting it the way the author meant it to be – which i will admit is somewhat the author's fault for not making it clearer.
The factory owner is not analogous to the thief. The state is. The thief and the state restrict the choice-set that said workers would otherwise have on the free market. The status of the factory owner is more less black and white. Certainly a capitalist can be considered a co-aggressor when s/he uses the State to eminent domain people off their land, socialize their fixed costs, raise barriers to entry against new competition…etc. But what of a capitalist who comes to a third world country where the people have been kept poor by the usual culprits? If s/he accepts none of the usual advantages from State aggression other than a monopsonistic bargaining position, is s/he violating libertarian principles?
I have never said sweatshops are moral, you are probably reading what I had commented wrong. I said sweatshops are "not immoral", not that they are moral. I purposefully made that comment because I attach an amorality to this action. It is not universally preferable, but it is a voluntary peaceful action.
Drat. I meant to emphasise it this way:-
Mick Price wrote:-
No! No! No!
Sweatshop work is not really better for the subsistence farmer who leaves his family. It’s only better for the person who can’t be a subsistence farmer any more.
Subsistence farming is not hard for real subsistence farmers, i.e. those who are only raising what they and their families need. They only have to work hard in bursts like the harvest season, and they are most certainly not used to thirteen hour days, day in and day out. Poor peasants who have to pay rents or taxes on top of providing for their own subsistence, those had to work hard like that, either on their own land if there was enough or on their landlords’ land or whatever – but they were not simple subsistence farmers as such.
Well said Todd S..
Abolishing sweatshops can be interpreted as an attempt to equalize the distribution of wealth and resources. People who are against abolishing sweatshops may be afraid of letting go of their cushy lifestyles. This is an understandabe fear, but let's look closer. Even within the "developed" countries there are huge and ever-growing gaps between the rich and the poor. In the U.S., for example, the top 1% of households own about 35% of the privately owned wealth, while the bottom 80% of households own only 15%. A very small percentage of the global population owns a collosal amount of the world's wealth and resources, while billions of people are living on the brink of starvation.
You may argue that they earned their money fairly, but is it fair to ransack other countries for their resources and labor power? It starts with deforestation and pollution that leads to such environmental degradation that local farmers can no longer grow crops on their now infertile, polluted soil. Agrarian societies must now seek new sources of food and resources. This is the first generation of people being FORCED to urbanize–to move together in closer corners to work as laborers in the very factories that polluted their land in the first place. A viscious cycle of dependence grows along with disease and loss of cultural knowledge.
These workers were definitely forced into their dependence on industrialization and they are not better off for it. The astounding audacity of capitalists to claim that industrialization actually saved them from working the fields is absolutely reprehensible.
I think the important point is that sweatshops do not arise in a vacuum – they arise in situations so rife with corruption and denial of basic property rights that other avenues towards generating income are denied.
Sweatshops might be better than starvation, but they would not exist in an environment of strongly protected natural rights.
Libertarians are nothing if not logical, and this post is rife with logic errors. While I am happy that there is some small common ground between Paul Krugman and libertarians, you have set Krugman up as a straw man for libertarianism. Further your entire argument begs the question "what is a sweat shop ?". There are no objective criteria for distinguishing between say a chinese or mexican sweatshop and any other unskilled employment anywhere or for that matter any other employment where a large portion of employees are disgruntled or wish they had other choices. Libertarians can make a distinction between slavery – actual forced labor, and conditions where workers may wish they had a better choice. Misuse of words like force and coercion is not going to persuade many libertarians.
Absent government intervention – a real form of force, or actual slavery again real force, workers everywhere are always free to choose. Employers offer jobs. They do so freely. They are under no obligation to do so. They are free to withdraw from the market. Some may go bankrupt or even starve – but they are still free. Employees always have the same freedom. They can take a specific job, look for another, organise and demand changes or not work and possibly starve. Employer deception about working conditions is irrelevant so long as the employees are still free. Worker unhappiness with the available choices creates the demand for better opportunities. In an actual free market it is inevitable that someone will find a way to profit from that demand.
Expecting government to step in, is the introduction of real force. Further all forms of government intervention essentially devolve to forms of price control, and the only system for regulating prices that actually works is the free market.
We do not have actual free markets anywhere. If you have a problem with "sweatshops" such as those that essentially kidnap or enslave workers – we are in agreement that is not the free market. But if your objection essentially boils down to wishing that there were other choices, we are at odds. One persons freedom can not impose a positive burden to act on another.
When business pays government to achieve something it can not accomplish on its own, you no longer have a free market, further you have a real use of force. Pretty much by definition anything business can not accomplish on its own in a free market that requires government is a use of force. It is that use of force that is wrong.
If you want me to condemn corporate use of government power – totally behind you. Though the blame lies primarily with government. The power to use force and therefore the responsibility to chose how to use it resides with government not business. The solution is to keep government out of the problem entirely, not to solve the problem of the corporate use of government force by proxy with employee use of government force by proxy.
The libertarian objections to the Civil Rights act is solely to its application to individuals rather than government. Equal rights with respect to government and law are cornerstones to libertarianism. Abhorrence of institutionalised racism – or discrimination of any kind in the form of government impositions on voting, Jim Crow laws, etc is probably stronger in libertarians than liberals. Libertarians are opposed to both the breadth of government power it represents and the racism embodied in those laws. Libertarians have a stronger intellectual foundation for their opposition. The price of all government power is individual liberty. Libertarians do not have to explain why discriminating on the basis of race is unacceptable, but discriminating on the basis of place of birth is. What is outside the scope of government power is not subject to discrimination by government.
The aspect of libertarian beliefs that runs at odds with the civil rights act is government limitations on each individuals right to choose as they please. Libertarians oppose taking away an individuals personal freedom – even where the exercise of that freedom is repugnant, so long as the exercise of the freedom is not at the expense of the freedom of another. Individuals discriminate in life everyday. Sometimes the basis for that discrimination is valid and in others it may be offensive to others. As with speech the appropriate response to discrimination is to speak or act, not to resort to violence. The force behind all law is government sanctioned violence, and that must be limited to responses to violence.
In libertarian society displeasure with the free choices of another are expressed in free choices of your own.
Libertarians oppose Land Seizure and the massive elimination of alternatives through the use of state force.
If sweatshops can not exist without those buttresses that does not offend libertarian values.
Most of the so called problems the left demands government action on could not exist without the abuse of government power in the first place.
Further there is a fundamental distinction between situations libertarians do not like and those we are willing to use force to change.
When government steps in an dictates the consequences extend past cheap goodies for you. The unseen consequences of government interference is less jobs. Not just less jobs in the sweat shop but less jobs throughout the economy. Legislation that guarantees certain working conditions, takes jobs from anyone insufficiently productive to justify the cost of providing those conditions. Even if the cost is somehow entirely passed on to the consumer, increasing prices decreases purchases and ultimately decreases jobs. Organised labor, and to a lessor extent the left, opposed so called sweatshops, not because they want mexicans and chinese to have better jobs, but because they want them to have no jobs. They prefer mass starvation elsewhere to the fallacy of lost jobs here.
This is the altruism behind opposition to sweatshops.
I agree David. "Sweatshop" is an arbitrary category. How little a wage does a worker have to make in order to supposedly be working in a sweatshop? $10/hr? $5/hr? $2/hr? $1/hr? $.50/hr? Tell me. When exactly in a non abitrary fashion does a worker become a sweatshop worker? You can't determine when. __"Sweatshop" is just a moral condemnation that is made possible by a society that lives in excess and cannot imagine what it would be like to live without excess. In past, every shop involved sweat so to complain about "sweatshops" would be idiotic.
Right off the back it tries to compare employer – employee relationships as slave relationships on Pg.6. This is bogus because its not clear how employer – employee relationships by their very existence outlaw or prohibit other relationships.
On the same page he saids that capitalism SHOULD mean the employer -employee relationship, but he gives no reason why capitalism must mean precisely that. Words have differing definitions and everyone can choose their own definition for a word. My opinion is that there is nothing odd about capitalism having self-employered workers owning firms. What? Is the author going to argue against my opinion?
I'm not reading that whole book. The introduction is stupid and self-serving right off the back.
It is hard to think that, in any kind of truly freed market, sweatshops would even exist. To try and frame the question in terms of today's state-controlled markets is problematic and mostly irrelevant.
One has to ask themselves: if the state did not control much of the land's resources, or sanction the theft of most resources by the connected elites (land monopoly, etc.), would these so-called destitute workers even see sweatshop labor as a choice? I should think not. The real problem is that the state and its cronies, via things like the land monopoly, have falsely removed alternative choices from the working poor.
Well, I agree on the principle you're using here. I wouldn't say that we should restrict the freedom to contract, but rather that courts and others should refuse to recognize and enforce such contracts. However, I fail to see how many of the examples you list actually fall into this category.
A better approach here, I think, is that some relationships are morally repugnant, not in themselves, but because of the unspoken background.
The attack on prostitution, by the way, is uncalled for. Unless, of course, you also find low-price prostitution morally repugnant. How about prostitution at $0?
None of these. The term describes a type of business, not a particular labor contract. To qualify as a sweatshop, it has to arise, not on the market, but in a neoliberal order.
A transaction between someone embedded in the social-political-legal order of an open society and that of a closed society is not automatically a free-market interaction – it is invalid to apply the same analysis that would hold between two agents in a free society.
Not only can any benefit to workers of a closed society (such as wage increase over time by competition between sweatshops) be completely recaptured by the state (tax, extortion, inflation, savings capture…many other means), it is very much in the State's interest to recapture in order to suppress real wage increases and thus preserve a competitive position amongst multinationals looking to outsource operations. In fact, it is often a deliberate long-term strategy rather than incidental – a country's sweat-shop industry is most attractive when not only are real wages low, but they are expected to *remain* low over time (opening factories is after all a long term capital commitment). To the extent multinationals are doing business with a state engaging in any policy mix that absorbs the majority of what would otherwise be competitive real wage increase, they are complicit and are engaged in behavior that directly violates free market principles.
[Note: by "State" of a closed society include the complex of beneficiaries, agents, allied private interests etc that hold power and derive benefits through non-free market state institutions]