When Paul Krugman defended sweatshops in the pages of the New York Times and Slate Magazine in 1997, he understandably raised a chorus of criticism, so when I wrote “Do Sweatshops Belong in a Free Market?” I expected at least some cognitive dissonance. After all, sweatshops are an issue that many feel passionately about. However, I was surprised at the level of the resistance that greeted what I thought was not a very controversial position on my part. This article is an attempt to clarify my argument and respond to some of this criticism.
In my opinion, a sweatshop is an antiquated form of wage slavery that does not belong in a free society any more than conscription or the Atlantic slave trade. Economists like Paul Krugman have provided an ideological foundation for sweatshops because they are an integral part of the globalist worldview, but that is a worldview that libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and other likeminded individuals oppose. Therefore, it is in our interest to not only distance ourselves from this exploitive form of labor, but to repudiate it entirely.
The central tenant of my argument is that force and aggression do not always have to involve the threat of immediate physical harm. A person may be coerced into surrendering their property (or their labor) under a variety of conditions. For example, being tricked into signing a contract he or she cannot read or understand, having the welfare of his or her family threatened, or being required to rent equipment essential to the job while being paid barely enough to cover those expenses. All of these are common practices at sweatshops.
My purpose in attempting to apply the non-aggression principle to this issue was to provide a skeleton around which an effective, free-market argument against sweatshops could be formed. The reason the issue of sweatshops in particular needs to be addressed, as opposed to just force or fraud generally, is because there appears to be a significant number of people who claim to both support the free market (or anarcho-capitalism) and sweatshops. Not only is this position contradictory, in my opinion, but it hurts the free market cause by playing right into the hands of our opponents, who believe that a free(d) market would bring back the worst aspects of industrialization.
Gary Chartier suggests that there are two possible objections to sweatshops, one based on the Non-Aggression Principle and one based on moral grounds. In order to be both morally objectionable and inconsistent with the NAP, a sweatshop operation would have to be responsible for the dispossession that leaves potential workers with little alternative but to accept what they would otherwise regard as unacceptable workplace conditions. Even if the sweatshop operation was not responsible for this, however, the terms and conditions of employment may still be morally objectionable. This moral objection could justly lead to labor organizing, strikes, protests, etc.
There are pragmatic concerns as well. Namely, that any argument in which sweatshops are a legitimate alternative is a losing argument, especially in Western nations. It is one thing to run a thought experiment on the cost or benefits of cheap labor, but quite another to convince an assembly line worker at a factory in Pittsburg to give up his or her government-enforced minimum wage, break time, and overtime pay, not to mention his or her job security and benefits, in the name of capitalism and free competition. Even if for some reason you believe sweatshops are theoretically compatible with a free market or a stateless society, if you ever wanted to see progress toward those ends, it would be prudent to file that belief somewhere away from the court of public opinion.
The following is a short list of additional considerations:
- Opposition to sweatshops should, and can, be a position that unites everyone in the liberty movement, from libertarians to anarcho-capitalists and beyond.
- Many anarcho-capitalist and libertarian philosophers, including Murray Rothbard, have made extensive arguments against the type of unjust contracts that lead to sweatshops.
- Even if sweatshops were a byproduct of a free market, they should be opposed on pragmatic and moral grounds.
- This is not a “left or right” issue. The dignity and welfare of the working individual should be a concern to everyone.
- Just because the West industrialized in a certain way, doesn’t mean that others must industrialize in that same way. They can learn from our mistakes.
It is my hope that further discussion of this subject will yield a consensus that removes this persistent but antiquated obstacle to convincing working people that a free market is in their best interest. I am confident that most of the people reading this have always opposed sweatshops (as well as other excesses of industrial capitalism), but to those who still harbor doubts, I will say this: Think long and hard about what you are supporting and how that support appears to the average person. Do not make things easier for our intellectual opponents by defending this untenable position.
Defining things as "aggression" solely on the basis that they are objectionable both lacks intellectual rigor and is immensely dangerous because there is no tyranny that can't potentially be cast as allegedly seeking after laudable ends. That, rather than an affirmative affection for putting people in objectionable working conditions is the crux of the criticism you have encountered. However, a deeper analysis can show that while sweatshops aren't "aggression" in and of themselves that they are a result of a broader context of aggression — a forcible narrowing of the choices that would otherwise be available to free people. I would urge you to pursue that approach.
I agree. It's possible for something to be objectionable or "unfair" without necessarily being unjust (in the sense of aggression or coercion).
But there are a great many things that, while not involving direct aggression in the transaction itself, take place against background conditions of aggression.
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The argument for sweatshops is actually very simple. ALL choices can only be evaluated in comparison to the available alternatives. If you have the choice of 8 hour workdays in decent environments, sweatshops are inhumane. If your choice include 7 day a week, 14 hour a day workdays on the farm for bare subsistence, or else the inhumane 12 hours a day, 6 day a week sweatshop, for 3x the take-home $….one might be willing to support sweatshops as doing a LITTLE to improve the lives of the folks who work in them. Talking about how they are not doing enough to improve folks lives sounds rather ungrateful. Ditto the lives of children of 12 who now work in sweatshops, but who used to spend the whole of daylight picking through the city dump. Much improvement. If you happen to be right, then you'd likely find that in sweatshop factories, it was hard to find workers. If instead, you find that workers love the opportunity to work in a sweatshop, and that there are 1000s of applications per job opening…you might instead come to think that sweatshops, given the rest of the institutional structure, are a strongly positive force mitigating poverty, rather than making things worse.
With agriculture and population growth, malthusian poverty is the natural state of affairs. The question is not what would be ideal for people…but what is a sustainable pattern of economic activity, where all players win, that can lead them out of poverty.
Argument 2: The choice is not, for a country, between getting Nike to open a sweatshop, or getting Nike to open a humane factory. The choice is between Nike opening a sweatshop locally, opening a sweatshop one country over, or leaving the jobs in the USA. Which do you prefer? Greater poverty, and no path forward? Or a sweatshop?
The debate…and I count myself as a solid left-libertarian anarchist…is whether at the margin, sweatshops are good for the people working in them or bad. If one compares to American lives…they suck. If one compares to the lives folks are living without the sweatshop there…the question is nowhere near as clear-cut.
I agree with Kleen that trying to sell "sweatshops" as in any way a positive thing is a losing proposition. The best that can be said of low-wage, long-hour labor in poor conditions is "this is the least bad thing available — let's figure out what it takes to make better things available."
It seems to me that that's a matter of "striking the root" — said root being the "broader context of aggression" that Brad mentions.
The sweatshop owner may be a good guy doing the best he can both for himself and for those around him within that ugly broader context, or he may be an active participant in creating that ugly broader context for his own benefit. Either way, he's probably a bit player and therefore putting the focus on him isn't the best way to change the context.
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Mr. Knapp,
Could you elaborate a bit on how sweatshops would be opposed in a free market. You mentioned strikes and protests, which seem like fair tactics.
Also, wouldn't it be difficult for a sweatshop owner to survive in a free market? After all, if there is free entry into all industries, every industrialist has the incentive to pay his/her workers just a little bit more than the other guy.
I frankly don't believe in this "wage slavery." If it's an issue of force, it's wrong. If it's an issue of fraud in the contract (deception to the worker), it is wrong. I feel the law should, and will, invariably attack legitimate coercion. However, a person voluntarily choosing shitty, horrible working conditions is not legally or morally wrong. I think a society of liberty MUST accept the choices of these individuals.
Yep. In a freed market, where companies wouldn't have intellectual "property" monopolies or WTO (or any of the other) subsidies, it's hard to see how a sweatshop would last or provide much benefit to the owner.
Daniel,
Actually I didn't mention strikes or protests, but they seem like fair tactics to me as well.
I agree that it would be difficult for a sweatshop to survive in a free market, for several reasons. Probably the simplest one to throw out there is that a free market would engender a high enough level of general prosperity (or rather a return to such a level — see Carson for the history on that) that workers would have numerous more attractive options, and likely savings to at least temporarily fall back on rather than accept low wages and poor working conditions.
To the extent that a traditional "wage labor" system survived at all, employers would find it more economic and efficient to offer decent wages and working conditions than to constantly confront labor shortages when workers said "screw it — I can probably get a better deal down the street, and if not I'll go home and fool around with my garden for a couple of months until that better deal shows up."
Or maybe not. If sweatshops are the price of freedom, I'll pay it. I don't know if any of the places I've worked in would have met the definition, but I regard some as having come close. I handled it in a state capitalist environment, why couldn't I in a considerably freer one?
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"However, a deeper analysis can show that while sweatshops aren't "aggression" in and of themselves that they are a result of a broader context of aggression — a forcible narrowing of the choices that would otherwise be available to free people." That pretty much says it in my opinion. However I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of sweatshops owners were aggressors in the literal sense as well because when people are in such a destitute state it's easier to take advantage of them, especially when you have the state under your control.
Actually, if you you will see that it is a pragmatic foundation, not an ideological one. And this whole article fails to address the problems thrown on the exploited that are met in a pragmatic and inadequate way, that many of the earlier article’s commenters did appreciate and bring out.
(Typo alert: “tenant” for “tenet”.)
"Wage slavery" is conceptual muddying of the water. Voluntarily trading labour for a wage is not slavery, and to suggest otherwise strikes me as a distasteful diminishing of the abuse that is real slavery.
Sweatshop: "a shop or factory in which employees work for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions"
There's no violation of NAP necessary for the existence of such a place. So libertarianism, if it's understood as a position on the legitimate use of force (http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block26.html), has nothing to say about them as such. A person's personal moral convictions are a different matter–but also nothing to do with libertarianism in the sense just mentioned.
A commitment to intellectual rigour rules out a "libertarian opposition" to sweatshops *as such*, since they do not violate NAP. As far as strategy goes, I agree with Brad Spangler that a more appropriate and fruitful approach would be to demonstrate, if possible, why a free market would make sweatshops extremely rare–and why we should expect more sweatshops under statism.
So, is choice defined simply as access to more than one alternative?
If the elite, through the state, have established an economic structure under which an individual must decide either to work in a sweatshop or to starve, then that's somehow not coercion? The coercion comes in limiting available alternatives, not at some artificial "decision point." Under your definition, even a slave in the antebellum South would have had "choices." He could have tried to run away, refused to work or committed suicide. The distinction between being beaten to death by your owner (because of your choice) or starving to death (because of your choice) may be meaningful in theory to us, but, to the victim, dead is dead.
My point is that coercion "upstream" from the physical moment of choice is still coercion, and that its result, in this case, the sweatshop, should be seen as every bit as coercive as the overseer wielding his lash.
Oops, I must have misread something.
Anyway, thanks for the response. I'll have to check out "Equal and opposite reaction."
Can I suggest here that Mr. Kleen has still not taken fully to, or converted to the conclusion that strict adherence to NAP in society would likely rid us of sweatshop-like labor conditions altogether? And that his pleas to avoid the appearance of support for sweatshops are of a moral nature and not directly applicable to the consistent application of NAP.
However, I also see that no one has as yet addressed the author's expansion of the interpretation of NAP into the non-physical realm. . . i.e. psychological coercion. FTA: "The central tenant of my argument is that force and aggression do not always have to involve the threat of immediate physical harm."
I do not have a coherent answer of my own. . . so I put it out there: What are the logical grounds (if they do exist) for not including; manipulation, psychological abuse of children, libel, slander, etc.; within the framework of the non-aggression principle?
If a sweatshop worker leaves his job, the capital owner cannot hunt him down and force him to work again. A capital owner cannot prevent the worker from seeking out another job, or hold him to some nonexistant debt. A worker who choses not to work a certain job, choses it.
I understand the theoretical set of choices that a sweatshop worker has – and the difference between chattel slavery and wage slavery. Yes, they are different. However, they are the same in a couple of important ways. Both involve the arbitrary removal of options from one individual in order to increase options for another individual. Both depend on the state acting as the enabling agent for the exploitation. Now, of course, a sweatshop worker can choose to stay employed…and be worked to death, or to quit his employer…and starve. It seems like there might have been some violence involved in the reduction of his options to that point. To say that the sweatshop owner is not, in any way, party to that violence is the height of sanctimony.
If there is an ethical imperative to oppose violence (whether committed by the state or by an individual), then the beneficiary of that violence is as culpable as the direct agent. It's facile and hypocritical to ignore the intimate relationship between the gunman and the bagman.
The standard definition of “sweatshop” – low wages, long hours and poor conditions – is so vague and subjective that it is hard to make a case for against them without more specificity. It’s sort of like defining an ugly painting.
I am reminded of a job I had in the seventies working on a huge printing press. It was extremely loud, hot and dirty. I had to climb around on the thing while it was running and clean moving rollers with a sponge on a stick. Old-timers with missing fingers told me the tricks of avoiding losing an arm. For most of one summer, I worked 12-hour days, six days a week. But, I was bringing home $600 a week at 18 years of age.
I could have walked, but earning $2.25 an hour at the mall had little appeal to me. I would have been pissed off if some do-gooder showed up claiming I was too ignorant to know how badly I had it working for Media General for long hours, under poor and dangerous conditions, for far less than the owners of the company earned.
I’m also wondering where all these pro-sweatshop libertarians are. Are these the same ones fighting for the right of pornographers to inject heroin? Or maybe the right to own and use nuclear weapons?
It just seems to me that there are much more important things on the list of things that need to be repudiated than the nebulous “sweatshop”.
I'm sure you could find pro-sweatshop libertarians at Mises.org or Lew Rockwell's site. The job you describe had obviously been in existence for a long time as you mention old timers with missing fingers. One would think that in all of this time someone could have implemented a safer procedure to clean these presses. But no, that would require slowing down almighty production and thus profits. This is the point. Where people come second to the almighty dollar you have potential for abuse, and we can say that sweatshops are just at the far end of that scale of abuse. I'll leave it to others to haggle over all of the "grey area" such as the job you describe.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Actually there is little choice in what the usual sweatshop worker may do in life. The aggression by the state has already been committed when the industrial society was forced upon their way of life. After all, what did these people do for hundreds of years before. The state and agricultural monopolies made their agrarian lives impossible to sustain and many were forced to move to cities to survive. I see little choice as far as "free market" factors go. Sure, no one is putting a gun to ones head and forcing them to work in the literal sense. The "gun" in this case is usually economic violence.
In some countries (such as those sweatshops are found) people cannot leave their jobs before paying off their employer for any debt accrued. Other restrictions exist too. Regardless, the people who are sweatshop workers are usually dispossessed peasants whose lives have become immeasurably harder and thus seek anything slightly better. That is coercion, though perhaps indirect here.
Hi!
I rather prefer to talk about equal-liberty-for-everyone instead of the principle of “no agression”, because if there is no equal-liberty-for-everyone, there is agression somewhere. There cannnot be a privileged liberty and a regular one in a libertarian society or there would be no reasons for being libertarian. And sweatshops had always occur in places were there are serious violations to equal-liberty.
By the way, the Free Market, does not exist yet. Hence, any “voluntarily” f*ck$d up job that anyone has to overcome is NOT product of a Free Market decision but one option of the limited alternatives that (actual) capitalism (and its Corporate State) leaves (most of) us to survive. And (actual) capitalism was based on privileged and coercion.
Thanx to Michael Kleen for two great expositions about the incompatibility of sweatshops and libertarian economic relationships.
Mike K – I’m not so sure that you will find pro-sweatshop libertarians anywhere. I’ve never seen it. The defense of sweatshops that you believe is prevalent may be a reaction against the vague and unsubstantiated claims made by critics of sweatshops who seem to feel they know better what is good for the workers at the so-called sweatshops than the workers themselves.
One would think that in all of this time someone could have implemented a safer procedure to clean these presses. But no, that would require slowing down almighty production and thus profits. This is the point.
Putting sponges on the end of sticks instead of holding them in your hands was the safer procedure implemented. When working around large machinery with exposed moving parts is inherently unsafe, even when all measures to mitigate dangers are taken. Loose clothing, pony-tails, etc. can get grabbed and cause serious injury. So, even in your short statement regarding safety, you presume to know that there could be a safer procedure that could be implemented. Your comments are based on a specific situation of which you have no direct knowledge of and which I have an intimate knowledge of.
So, you have made my point that often critics of sweatshops don’t make a good case against them because their arguments often lack specific information and always infer that the critic knows better than the workers what is best for the workers.
I think many libertarians have a reactionary knee-jerk response to critics of any sort of capitalism as often these critics are also opposed to free markets. Too many libertarians don’t seem to realize that there are many free market anti-capitalists. I imagine that there could be examples of sweatshops that when specifics are laid out and framed in a particular way, these pro-capitalist libertarians would not defend them.
The larger debate within the libertarian movement is whether capitalism as it exists should be defended, or should free markets be promoted instead.
It just seems to me that “sweatshop” starts off as a pejorative and with no specifics, no knowledge of the workers, and no knowledge of all the circumstances, broad condemnation of everything a critic may deem to be a “sweatshop” is a nonstarter.
Define pro-sweatshop.
Do you mean those who think sweatshops should not be suppressed by force of law (like setting a minimum wage), or those who see the benefits of sweatshop, or those who think sweatshops are an effective stepping stone towards a more developed society? I don’t think anybody claims the pay or conditions are great or ideal, by definition of a sweatshop.
there seems to be two seperate frames for this question of sweatshops, that of a true, free market and that of existing conditions.
a sweat shop, fundamentally a warehouse where workers don't receive their full share of the product return, could not exist in a free market, if you define a free market as free exchange in the abcense of force.
as far as our existing world situation, sweat shops are a necessary componet of the corporate monopoly structure. without them, profits would diminish or even cease to exist for multinational corporations. once the force that cements that structure into the exchange system ceases, sweat shops will be a thing of the past. the other side of the coin is that as long as the force is there, the sweatshop will remain.
so yes, if you believe in the existing economic structure, then sweat shops are "legitimate", as they certainly are in our world.
they lose their legitimacy and their existence when the coercive nature of our economy is removed. they cannot be seperated from the structure of the system.
""Wage slavery" is conceptual muddying of the water. Voluntarily trading labour for a wage is not slavery, and to suggest otherwise strikes me as a distasteful diminishing of the abuse that is real slavery."
Work for me for excessive hours a day in bad conditions for a low wage or starve thanks to the enforcement of a corrupt state = slavery
"Do you mean those who think sweatshops should not be suppressed by force of law (like setting a minimum wage)"
What about the fact that the property laws that enable sweatshops to exist wherever they do are *enforced* by the state?
You say "With agriculture and population growth, malthusian poverty is the natural state of affairs." But doesn't global imperialism waged by the U.S. and allied countries who are at the behest of the corporations who rely on sweatshop and low wage labor play a role? In other words can't an argument be made that countries in the 'third world' and what not who are poor are kept this way on purpose in order to retain sweatshop type labor?
Notice how the author STILL doesn't explain in a non-arbitrary way what a "sweatshop" is.
I think I see part of the argument you're trying to make. In essence, there is choice, one has either to work at a sweatshop or go hungry. However, when the sweatshop is the only game in town (due to high turnover rates, casualties in the workplace, etc.), there is no real choice. It's either starve with a little money in your pocket, or starve with no money in your pocket. In most places with sweatshops, this is usually the case; there is little to no choice on going to a sweatshop, it is just a matter of which sweatshop won't kill you as fast. It is merely the illusion of choice as mandated by the government and by the corporations who either stick the government in their back pockets or require government subsidies to continue making profit. Regardless, though, I do agree with you in your article; you need a happy workforce in order to have a productive workforce (speaking from personal experience), and I am pretty sure sweatshops do not produce happy workers.
No it can't be made without support. Why don't you make it? Is the US keeping Vietnam poor? How? Prove it. This piece was pathetic. Where is the economic analysis? Where are the tradeoffs? Where are the hard choices? Where are the restrictions of choice that workers face and whose fault are they?
Nothing was mentioned, simply a stupid rehashing of the left-liberal moral position.
Monopolies and sweat shops arose in pre state capitalist conditions as in Dicken's England and 19th century America. While the state supporting large industry obviously doesn't help, the disappearance of the state doesn't guarantee large business owners will behave in an ethical way as long as there is the most money to be made by leveraging monopoly and exploiting labor. That is why I am in the anrcho-syndicalist market cooperative camp.
Sweatshops are indeed antiquated but in they are actually a stepping stone to a more prosperous society. No one should be forced to work at one but you have to realize that a sweatshop is actually providing a path to a better life – or else no one would want to work there.
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But you are forced because the property system is enforced by the government. They're the ones keeping the wealthy that way. It would be different if there were no government and businesses were forced to protect their property on their own. Then you'd see people rebelling against them and saying fuck this, this is a monopoly we want our share. But the monopoly of force provided by governmernt is what enables these huge discrepancies of wealth that make people have to choose between working for slave wages or starving. That's coercion.