In the past several months, Matt Zwolinski and Ben Powell took to the pages of the Journal of Business Ethics, as well as the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, to defend what they consider to be the mainstream libertarian position on sweatshops: that sweatshops represent a positive good in developing economies. Citing Kevin Carson and I as representative of the left-libertarian position against sweatshops, Matt Zwolinski took us to task in his recent article, “Answering the Left-Libertarian Critique of Sweatshops.” (My two articles on the subject can be found here and here.) I cannot speak for Mr. Carson, but I do not consider my opposition to sweatshops as a “left wing” position; I consider it to be the only sensible position for libertarians and other champions of a free market to take.
First, let us be clear about the definition of a sweatshop. A sweatshop is not any working environment in a developing economy; it is a working environment that is considered to be unreasonably difficult or dangerous. Many factors might contribute to a factory being labeled a “sweatshop,” including long hours without breaks, low pay, overcrowding, poor lighting and ventilation, unsanitary conditions, and few to zero considerations for employee safety. Low pay is just one of these factors and may not even be the chief factor in determining whether a particular place of employment can be called a sweatshop.
The argument in favor of sweatshops, as laid out by libertarians like Matt Zwolinski and Ben Powell (as well as neo-liberals like Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof), is essentially an economic argument. Sweatshop labor, they argue, is often the best (or only) option individuals in the developing world have for improving their lot in life. Therefore, it would be immoral to oppose sweatshops because their absence would take away a crucial option for economic improvement.
That argument only holds up, however, if and only if sweatshops are the sole option for economic improvement in a developing economy. The individual is presented with a false choice: accept these conditions or face starvation and death in a grim struggle for survival. Under that dichotomy, it is assumed that accepting the unfavorable conditions of a sweatshop is the only sensible choice for that individual to make (it is also assumed that the employer has no control whatsoever over the conditions in his or her own factory, but more on that later). No considerations are given for alternative labor models, such as co-ops, family owned farms or businesses, mutual associations, or guilds, all of which are available to any individuals who choose to utilize them. However, the simplest alternative to a sweatshop is a factory owner that does not treat his or her employees like chattel.
Therein lies the mistake proponents of sweatshops make; it is not the poverty of the employees, but rather the conditions to which they are subjected that is the injustice. In Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, he argued that social justice dictates that a free market must be tempered by moral considerations. “Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.”
It is this moral imperative that is missing from Zwolinski and Powell’s analysis. According to Zwolinski, “Left-libertarian critics of sweatshops… have offered no evidence that sweatshops, or the multinational enterprises that contract with sweatshops, can be directly implicated in the injustices that workers have suffered.” Since sweatshop owners and managers are directly responsible for the conditions of their businesses, however, the evidence is there—it just requires the observer to look beyond a worldview that measures quality of life by the number of coins in someone’s pocket.
Libertarianism is not about people just getting by; it is about maximizing human liberty. Liberty cannot be achieved as long as eking out a living in dangerous conditions for 12 to 14 hours a day is an individual’s most attractive option. In such a society, the mutually beneficial arrangements that define the world of commerce have clearly broken down. There is no reason that libertarians or other advocates of a free market need to sacrifice their moral compass at the altar of economic development. Economic development can and should be achieved in many different ways, but it will take the cooperation of both labor and capital to see that sweatshops do not continue to be an acceptable path to prosperity. I hope that libertarians will be at the forefront of that struggle.
What right does ANYONE have in getting between two (or more) individuals in the free exchange of labor and/or property?
How does one maximize Liberty by initiating force upon someone(s) by telling them they are not allowed to work below a certain level of compensation if they are willing to do it?
As long as there is a free and voluntary exchange of labor and/or property then it is nobody's business to interfere or initiate force upon any party involved therein. Such interference doesn't ensure "Liberty" -but instead is the very definition of tyranny -regardless of what one calls it.
Now if the workers are being forced to work against their will or not being compensated as they agreed this is slavery and/or breach of contract. There are slave factories and there are unscrupulous factories that do not honor their contracts with their employees. But the term "sweatshop" is, to me, just code for interventionism from collectivist meddlers who want nothing more but to infringe on people's liberty -not maximize it.
I'd rather see kids in sweatshops than in prostitution. But to each their own.
Michael,
You know that the “sweatshop” is the employees’ best option because they choose to continue working there. If co-ops, family farms, etc. were available or preferable, the sweatshops would lose workers to such organizations. Your very definition and description of “sweatshops” includes words like “unreasonable” and “unfavorable”. These are your subjective descriptions, and if you truly believe in liberty, you cannot impose your subjective valuations on other people’s peaceful, voluntary choices. If you want to argue there is some coercive feature in these countries’ institutions that eliminates or precludes alternatives to the sweatshop, then make that argument. But that’s completely different from saying sweatshops–as defined by you–should be forcibly shut down because they do not meet your standards for wages, safety, work hours, etc. This essay implies that some third party should forcibly intervene in these employment agreements, but you haven’t explained how such forcible intervention is justifiable under a framework of individual liberty. It boils down to the fact that you disapprove, and your disapproval warrants coercion.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for responding. I should say, though, that while my article mentioned both you and Kevin Carson, the arguments I actually ended up addressing in it ended up being Carson's exclusively. I was originally planning to address your claim (made in the first of your two earlier posts on the subject) that sweatshops violate the non-aggression principle, but ended up cutting it for reasons of space.
As I understand the argument you are making now, it is this: sweatshops might be defensible if they were the only way that the poor could be lifted out of poverty. But they are not. "Co-ops, family owned farms or businesses, mutual associations, or guilds" could do this too, without treating their employees like chattel. What is wrong with sweatshops is that they subject their workers to unreasonable treatment such as "long hours without breaks, low pay, overcrowding, poor lighting and ventilation, unsanitary conditions, and few to zero considerations for employee safety." The unreasonableness of this treatment, on your view, is not mitigated by the fact that workers agree to it.
Is that an accurate summary of your view?
If it is, then I have a number of points/questions to raise in response. First, I would ask how you would go about distinguishing "reasonable" ways that businesses might treat their employees from the "unreasonable" ones employed by sweatshops. If you actually look at the wages sweatshops pay, or if you actually talk to sweatshop workers, or if you just look at what the alternatives to sweatshop employment are, it's no surprise that the people who actually work at sweatshops, by and large, view them as not merely "reasonable" but extremely attractive. We in the United States wouldn't, of course, but isn't what's "reasonable" in these matters at least partly a function of economic development?
Second, to echo Jason's point, if sweatshop workers aren't working at co-ops, guilds, family farms and the like, then why not? Perhaps they're prohibited by doing so by law – laws that limit workers' rights of free association, or that seize peasants' land. If that's the case, then Ben and I – and really *everyone* in the sweatshop debate – thinks this is unjust and ought to be stopped. But if it's not the case – if workers are just *choosing* not to work in these places – then why do you have a problem with that? Isn't it probably the case that the *reason* they're not working in these kind of enterprises is that sweatshops offer a better prospect of success? Don't we have every reason to think that they know what's good for them better than some blogger halfway across the world?
Finally, suppose we accept your conclusion that sweatshops ought to pay higher wages, or provide better working conditions. What follows from this practically, on your view? Should consumers boycott sweatshop-produced goods? Should we impose labor regulations and minimum wage laws on sweatshops? One of the biggest problems I have with the articles that you and Kevin have written on sweatshops is that you're never clear about what the practical upshot of your arguments are. And it's hard to evaluate whether your proposal is better than ours (or better than the status quo) if we don't know what your proposal is!
I would just like to point out before this discussion goes any further, than in none of the three articles I have written about sweatshops do I argue that they should be forcibly shut down or that the government should step in the regulate them. I think you should read my arguments more carefully before making erroneous statements about them. Also, read my previous articles on sweatshops, because they contain arguments about force and fraud being a perquisite in those particular working conditions. This article was specifically in reply to the points raised by the one at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
My recent post Sweatshops and Social Justice: Can Compassionate Libertarians Agree?
All your moral points about sweatshops are valid. However, you didn't directly address the primary reason that sweatshops are able to flourish in the first place…the state. Thus, vulgar libertarians can fling self-righteous brickbats about "free exchange between individuals," while pretending that the rules of the game weren't set up in collusion between the state gunman and the corporate bagman.
The coercion involved in sweatshops does not come so much at the employer-employee level. It occurs much earlier. The state, at the behest of its plutocratic cronies, erects bureacratic mazes that the politically connected can bypass and charges license fees that are prohibitive to small competitors in order to create and maintain an impoverished underclass that just happens to *choose* to work fourteen-hour days in toxic conditions for dirt wages…as opposed to starving.
In a freed market, this dependency-exploitation model would be broken. Ultimately, the answer is not in moral arguments nor in state coercion toward sweatshop owners, but in forcing them, by means of the free market, to truly compete BOTH for workers AND for customers.
If it boils down to those two options, the game was over (and lost) long ago.
I posted this comment before I read Matt Zwolinski's comment, btw, and I think he raises a good question about "what is to be done." Obviously, I think we should start by not making arguments or writing articles in favor of sweatshops or making excuses for their existence. Let's leave that up to Paul Krugman and his ilk. Secondly, I think we should draft free market arguments against sweatshops, so that we can persuade other like-minded people to not support them. Thirdly, if possible, we should create a public outcry against sweatshops that makes sweatshop owners correct the conditions in their factories and workshops – without government intervention. I think those are all reasonable goals.
It seems to me that there is a significant moral difference between:
a) A situation in which a Company A takes advantage of the unjust force exercised *independently* by Government B against its citizens C in order to strike an advantageous (but non-fraudulent and not-in-itself coercive) deal with C.
b) A situation in which a Company A takes advantage of the unjust force exercised *at the behest of A* by Government B against its citizens C in order to strike an advantageous (but non-fraudulent and not-in-itself coercive) deal with C.
I think libertarians can all agree that b is wrong. It is not so clear to me that a is.
It is also not so clear to me that b is very common. I hear a lot of left-libertarians say the kinds of things you say in your first paragraph. But they almost never provide specific instances of specific companies acting in concord with specific governments in the way you suggest. Nor do they provide any evidence that the companies that are currently maligned as "sweatshops" behave in this way. So, do you have any relevant evidence?
My recent post A Bleeding Heart History of Libertarian Thought – Herbert Spencer
So, let's say that we convince people not to support sweatshops. Let's say we convince them not to buy sweatshop produced goods, and to pressure sweatshops to engage in more moral behavior.
So fewer people buy sweatshop produced goods and sweatshop revenue and profitability declines. How do sweatshops and the MNEs that contract with them respond? Here are two possibilities:
1) They realize that people want to buy ethically produced goods, and so begin to pay workers a higher wage, the incur expenses to improve safety conditions, and so on. Where does the money come from? Maybe the owners sacrifice their profits. Maybe customers pay a higher price.
2) They decide that the increased cost of ethically produced goods are not costs that they are willing or able to absorb. They therefore lay off workers, close down the factory and relocate elsewhere, replace workers with machines, or engage in some other activity that increases unemployment among workers in the developing world.
If 2 was the result of convincing people not to support sweatshops, and not 1, would you still think that it is a good idea to convince people not to support sweatshops?
Do you have some reason to believe that 1 is a more likely result than 2?
My recent post A Bleeding Heart History of Libertarian Thought – Herbert Spencer
Pat said it all.
If it got to the point that no one was buying products from factories and workshops that engaged in those labor practices, then there would be nowhere for them to go. If they set up shop in some other country, people would just avoid their products again. The simplest thing for the company to do is just bite the bullet and institute reforms. Look, you're acting like providing adequate lighting, safety precautions, and employing people in 8 or 10 hour shifts would somehow bankrupt the company. That's ridiculous. We're not talking about giving platinum healthcare and $35,000 a year to every employee. We're talking about abolishing a type of working environment in which the worker is kept in virtual servitude and is considered, for all intents and purposes, a disposable asset of the company.
There's a more fundamental problem, however, that I addressed in my earlier articles on the subject. Even if your economic argument is technically true, it still harms the libertarian cause to actively associate yourself with supporting labor practices that are widely considered to be inexcusable in the Western world. I say, let the neo-liberals argue for their globalist agenda, along with its sweatshops and "soft totalitarianism", and let us take the high ground and advocate for a human liberty that takes into consideration the dignity and well being of the working man.
My recent post Sweatshops and Social Justice: Can Compassionate Libertarians Agree?
So…in your world, states "just happen" to set up economic conditions that totally favor exploitation of the underclass, and the innocent sweatshop owners, for their part, "just happen" to wander by and find a ripe opportunity. How utterly convenient.
And if we aren't there to directly witness them making a deal, then everything must be on the up and up. We can't assume anything by simply following the flow of money and power.
Seriously, it really isn't much of a stretch to connect the two dots of the state and the plutocracy, whether it's in Cambodia or right here in the USA. The owners of sweatshops are not libertarians. They are amoral opportunists who take advantage of their state-protected privilege to bleed the state-created helpless dry. Whether they played a direct role in establishing that privilege or not is irrelevant. Carry their water all you want, but don't pretend it has anything to do with libertarian principles.
So, since you ignored my question the first time, I'll ask again. Do you have any actual evidence of specific sweatshops acting in concord with specific governments in the way you suggest? Or is this all armchair theory?
My recent post A Bleeding Heart History of Libertarian Thought – Herbert Spencer
Armchair theory and a sarcastic tone aren't much of a substitute for facts, Pat. So, let me ask again the question I asked before. Do you have any actual evidence that specific sweatshops have engaged in collusion with governments in specific instances? Followup question: do you think that only those sweatshops that have actually engaged in such collusion are acting in a morally blameworthy way, or do you think the "fact" that *some* sweatshops have engaged in such collusion is sufficient to render *all* sweatshops blameworthy?
My recent post More on Talents
Hopefully, some day libertarians will confront the logical consistency between their stated ethical choices in favour of human freedom and the (social prevalence of the) employer-employee relationship.
Is labour exchangeable? No. Labour in se is not exchangeable. Only the products of labour – goods or services – are exchangeable.
Can the employer-employee relationship be an exchange of labour (for money)? By the above it cannot be. It is a relationship of rental of the capability to exert labour.
Is the rental of the human capability to produce labour consistent with libertarian ethical choices?
Can answers escape to take in account
http://www.ellerman.org/Davids-Stuff/Books/P&…
?
"If it got to the point that no one was buying products from factories and workshops that engaged in those labor practices, then there would be nowhere for them to go. If they set up shop in some other country, people would just avoid their products again. The simplest thing for the company to do is just bite the bullet and institute reforms."
(1) Let's suppose that it was true that if no one was buying from sweatshops, then the sweatshops would have to bite the bullet and institute reforms. Even if this were so, how likely is it, in your estimation, that *everyone* or even a *majority* of consumers will actually make there purchasing decisions on ethical grounds in the way this plan requires? To me, it seems quite unlikely, and so any plan for sweatshop reform that depends on this isn't going to be very helpful.
(2) Moreover, the assumption granted in (1) isn't necessarily true. Improvements in workers' wages or working conditions cost money (more on this below). Suppose that complying with the demands of anti-sweatshop activists raised the cost of sweatshop labor from $2/day to $2.50/day. Whether the company would be willing to pay this increased cost depends on two things: (a) whether the marginal value of workers' production is higher or lower than $2.50/day, and (b) whether employers have available to them more profitable substitutes for $2.50/day sweatshop labor. Regarding (a), employers will not pay workers more than the value of what they produce, regardless of consumer pressure. Regarding (b), your analysis above wrongly ignores two additional ways (that I mentioned in my original comment) in which the unemployment of sweatshop labor could come about: employers could substitute machines for sweatshop workers, or employers could substitute non-sweatshop labor for sweatshop workers. If the price of sweatshop labor is raised artificially high (enough), employers will stop hiring sweatshop workers and hire workers elsewhere who are more productive, or who are domestic and hence save the company on transportation costs etc.
"Look, you're acting like providing adequate lighting, safety precautions, and employing people in 8 or 10 hour shifts would somehow bankrupt the company."
I never said anything about bankruptcy. This is a red herring. So is the language of "virtual servitude" and "disposable asests." No one's endorsing slavery or the violation of libertarian rights here. The only question is whether employees have an obligation to provide their workers with wage/safety benefits above and beyond the market level. You seem to think they do, and I disagree.
What I *actually* said was that reforms cost money. And that money has to come from somewhere. And that if the reforms cost too much money, they are likely to have an unemployment effect at the margin. That's not the same as bankruptcy. But it does mean that some workers will be put out of a job that was, for them, a much, much better option than anything else available to them. I think that's a morally problematic result.
"Even if your economic argument is technically true, it still harms the libertarian cause to actively associate yourself with supporting labor practices that are widely considered to be inexcusable in the Western world."
I find this a rather bizarre argument. You're saying that even if the economic argument I'm making is correct, I shouldn't make it because a lot of people *consider* sweatshop labor to be bad? Really? Even if we believe a policy is morally justified, and good for the poor, we should refrain from advocating it because it will look bad to people with wrongheaded beliefs about economics? Our commitment to truth and justice should be subservient to misguided public opinion? Should libertarians abandon their opposition to the minimum wage for the same reason? To equal rights for gays and lesbians (if it makes us look bad to homophobes)? The mere fact that a neo-liberal like Krugman endorses a position does not make that position wrong. Libertarians -and everyone else! – ought to judge arguments on their merits. "Guilt by association" has no place in an honest intellectual evaluation of moral issues.
My recent post More on Talents
Suppose I live in a shanty made from available materials, with a dirt floor and no windows, in a village with no electricity, water system or sewage system. If there were any industry aside from agriculture involving the manufacturing of some product, locally owned or even worker owned, would it not be defined as a sweat shop by the vast majority of libertarians living in comparative luxury in America, regardless of hours worked, wages, or working conditions?
What does it even mean for a libertarian or anyone else, even an anarchist, to be for or against sweat shops? Is this about the perceptions of others regarding libertarian acceptance?
Can one be against sweat shops, yet accept the grinding poverty that exists in some third world hellholes? Should libertarians be for or against people subsisting on a diet of one bowl of rice and some rat meat every day?
Somehow, I doubt if a bunch of people debating what the correct libertarian position on sweatshops should be will be of much help to those who actually are working in sweatshops. In fact, I doubt they could give a rat's ass what libertarians think.
If you don't want to see any aggression in the exploitation of the poor by sweatshop owners, then go ahead and support it — "free to choose,"eh? As I said, I'm not privy to interactions that may or may not have taken place between state and business players. Under those conditions, I guess it's impossible, without solid proof positive, to condemn anyone from BP down to the local real estate baron for benefitting from cronyism, let alone sweatshop owners and political rulers in a different country. In fact, since the state-corporate collusion that gave birth to our own present oligopoly took place about a century ago, no one who benefits from its fruits today is culpable in any way. Right?
In short, IMHO, I guess if you're searching for loopholes in the NAP, or in any ethical code, then it's easy enough to find them. To me, the NAP is something to proudly uphold and (non-coercively) champion — not to try to weasel out of with rhetoric and sophistry.
"It is also not so clear to me that b is very common. I hear a lot of left-libertarians say the kinds of things you say in your first paragraph. But they almost never provide specific instances of specific companies acting in concord with specific governments in the way you suggest." ~ Matt Zwolinski
Wal Mart has pushed our government for an increase in minimum wage in the past. You really think their motives are altruistic? It all comes down to using the government to their advantage.
http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/25/news/fortune500/w… http://mises.org/daily/1950
I don't think there is enough information for people to make these decisions. But even if the information was available (they don't mark "sweatshop" on the products) it cannot be done as "individuals," because, contrary to libertarian doctrine, that never does anything. It takes communities, and although communities might be impelled to act by strong individuals, actions like this only work at a community level. Churches and other associations will have to take up the cause, and give considerable effort to educating their members.
"unreasonably difficult and dangerous" is an opinion.
"long hours" is an opinion.
"overcrowding" is vague. Everyone has different needs for privacy and silence.
"poor lighting" is vague. Not everyone's eyesight is the same.
C4SS doesn't understand that "sweatshop" cannot be objectively defined.
And all the moral crusades against greed in this article are nothing but acts of populist pandering. The biggest problem I have with C4SS is for the sake of creating a style of libertarianism that appeals to the masses it tries to combine contradictory moral principles that lead to the negation of other moral principles. Instead of helping libertarianism it is simply making libertarianism more incoherent as a moral philosophy. C4SS was the reason why I abandoned the label "libertarian" because they paint a picture of liberty that is relativistic and therefore cannot be the basis for ANY society.
D’Amato seems like a sane guy. Otherwise it's clearly the case that C4SS's function has so far consisted largely of "making libertarianism more incoherent," though this is a symptom of the vacuous and confused "left-libertarian anti-capitalism class warfare" conceptual framework embraced by most of its contributors and commenters. Anyway, based on contributions, looks like most readers concur.
As far as I'm aware, the "NAP" isn't about a puerile obsession with finding someone to blame for anything you think is suboptimal in human society. And, in all reasonable legal and moral theory, libertarian or otherwise, the burden of proof is squarely on the accuser's shoulders… so if you don't have "proof positive" or any empirical evidence to condemn some "sweatshop" manager or whoever, your pointless class-demonizing rhetoric and sophistry go nowhere.
Your statement shows the essential flaw in vulgar libertarianism and the lip-service it pays to the NAP.
Let's get theoretical. There are two shirt factories sitting next to each other. Each one employs 12-year olds, pays its workers a pittance and works them to death. You have proof that the owner of factory "A" colluded with the state to eliminate economic opportunity for workers, and benefits from the state's aggression. You don't have proof that the owner of factory "B" colluded with the state, but he still benefits from the state's aggression. Under *your* NAP, owner A is an exploitative, statist scumbag and owner B is a job-providing, savvy businessman, totally clean under the NAP. (I'm sure the workers appreciate the moral nuances of it all.)
Like I say, there are always a million ways to rationalize anything you want. But actions are actions.
You have no "proof" in reality because "collusion with the state" is ill-defined (like, does it just include passive benefit, or actively sought benefit, or just lobbying for state to create benefit, or only some cases of the latter, or what? think hard about who is going to be covered by any particular criteria…), and given states have existed for almost the entirety of human civilization, virtually anything can be traced back to some state "collusion" somewhere along the line, negative or positive or whatever.
More importantly, in reality, moralizing class warfare rhetoric attacking manufacturers (even state-collusive ones) does absolutely nothing to make the situation better for the "workers" you pretend to care about. Neoliberal reforms do.
Well, I guess that just about defines our common ground. Bon chance!
You state, "… the conditions to which they are subjected…is the injustice." but aren't those very conditions being voluntarily accepted by each employee? If so, then how is it possible that they are 'subjected' to those conditions?
My recent post Thrive: What on earth will it take?
Challenging the corporate-backed version of libertarianism most popularly understood today is likely to leave behind those who don't understand the premises. "C4SS was the reason why I abandoned the label "libertarian" because they paint a picture of liberty that is relativistic and therefore cannot be the basis for ANY society. " Why do you need someone to tell you which exact positions to take? Why do you think C4SS is trying to create a "style of libertarianism that appeals to the masses"? Maybe that's why you chose left-libertarianism but many choose it because they recognize and reject the use of force in ALL cases. Sweatshops are like unions- one gives you more hours because they can afford to pay you less, the other gives you less hours to maintain the wage rate. Both are the result of an un-free market.
DaveElectric makes statements about sweatshops that could excuse a factory farm of torture.
"That argument only holds up, however, if and only if sweatshops are the sole option for economic improvement in a developing economy."
WRONG.
The argument holds up not if sweatshops are the SOLE option, but rather, if they are the BEST option. People work at sweatshops because it is their best choice of employment. It is immoral to forcibly remove someone's best option for economic improvement.
If a young Cambodian girl has the choice between working at a sweatshop or being a prostitute, would you force her to do the latter by removing the better option?