Are dangerous factories the price of progress? A passionate debate now rages over whether international safety standards should be enforced against manufacturers in the developing world and their Western retailers. Proponents of standards argue that the costs would be small and the benefits great. An Accord on Fire and Building Safety has been signed by major retailers in Europe and a few in North America, but the Huffington Post says that 14 other North American retailers have refused to endorse it.  “Some retailers, like Walmart, claim they are working on separate initiatives to improve conditions and workplace safety in Bangladesh,” the online publication states, but this claim has been met with skepticism.

Opponents of government regulation argue that artificially raising the costs of manufacturing in poor countries would harm intended beneficiaries by destroying jobs. If so, workers would face worse options, including life on the streets and prostitution.

Unfortunately, the debate is unnecessarily narrow. What needs discussing — and radical changing — is the country’s political-economic system, which benefits elites while keeping the mass of people down. The economists are correct that under the status quo, imposing safety standards would raise costs, cause unemployment, and aggravate poverty. But we can’t leave the matter there. We must go on to examine how the political-economic system constricts people’s employment opportunities, including self-employment, and otherwise stifles their efforts to improve their lives. Thus, a debate over whether garment factories should be subject to safety regulations, while the status quo goes largely undisturbed, misses the point.

According to a report (PDF) written for the Netherlands ministry of foreign affairs, most Bangladeshis, unsurprisingly, are victimized by a land system that has long benefited the rural and urban elites. “Land-grabbing of both rural and urban land by domestic actors is a problem in Bangladesh,” the report states.

Wealthy and influential people have encroached on public lands…, often with help of officials in land-administration and management departments. Among other examples, hundreds of housing companies in urban areas have started to demarcate their project area using pillars and signboard before receiving titles. They use local musclemen with guns and occupy local administrations, including the police. Most of the time, land owners feel obliged to sell their productive resources to the companies at a price inferior to market value. Civil servants within the government support these companies and receive some plot of land in exchange.

Women suffer most because of the patriarchy supported by the political system. “Women in Bangladesh rarely have equal property rights and rarely hold title to land,” the report notes. “Social and customary practices effectively exclude women from direct access to land.”

As a result,

Many of the rural poor in Bangladesh are landless, have only small plots of land, are depending on tenancy, or sharecropping. Moreover, tenure insecurity is high due to outdated and unfair laws and policies…. These growing rural inequalities and instability also generate migration to towns, increasing the rates of urban poverty.

Much as in Britain after the Enclosures, urban migration swells the ranks of workers, allowing employers to take advantage of them. Since Bangladesh does not have a free-market economy, starting a business is mired in regulatory red tape — and worse, such as “intellectual property” law — that benefit the elite while stifling the chance for poor individuals to find alternatives to factory work. (The owner of the Savar factory, Mohammed Sohel Rana, got rich in a system where, the Guardian writes, “politics and business are closely connected, corruption is rife, and the gap between rich and poor continues to grow.”) Moreover, until the factory collapse, garment workers could not organize without employer permission.

Crony capitalism deprives Bangladeshis of property rights, freedom of exchange, and therefore work options. The people need neither the corporatist status quo nor Western condescension. They need radical land reform and freed markets.

De todos os comentários pretensamente libertários que tentam colocar a tragédia das confecções de peças de vestuário de Bangladesh em “perspectiva,” o de Benjamin Powell é provavelmente o pior (“Sweatshops Em Bangladesh Melhoram A Vida De Seus Trabalhadores, E Estimulam Crescimento,” Forbes, 2 de maio). Em Bangladesh, escreve Powell,

“cerca de 4.500 confecções empregam aproximadamente 4 milhões de trabalhadores. Levando-se em consideração todos os aspectos, eles ficam em melhor situação com as confecções do que ficariam sem elas; os benefícios superam os riscos. Na verdade, em comparação com outras oportunidades em Bangladesh, a indústria de peças de vestuário paga razoavelmente bem.”

Se empresas dos Estados Unidos como a Nike reduzissem sua presença em Bangladesh e abandonassem confecções lá por temor de má publicidade, “centenas de milhares de trabalhadores em peças de vestuário poderiam perder seus empregos e ser lançados em alternativas piores.”

Bem, é mesmo — sob certo aspecto. Quando um assaltante diz “seu dinheiro ou sua vida,” fico em melhor situação entregando o dinheiro e permanecendo vivo — mas foi o sujeito com a arma de fogo que estabeleceu artificialmente o leque de alternativas. A pergunta que você se deveria fazer, e que pessoas como Powell e o pessoal de nível de chefia da Nike não querem que você faça, é: quem decide quais outras alternativas estão disponíveis em Bangladesh?

Não se passa que algum fato da natureza, sem face, inevitável, seja forçado sobre as sweatshops — ou sobre a Nike — por algum mercado anônimo. Graças à marca registrada e à lei de patentes internacionais, a Nike e umas poucas outras empresas são as únicas opções disponíveis quando se trata de empregar pessoas para fazer sapatos. Elas podem aceitar o preço da Nike ou rejeitá-lo. Há porém muitas sweatshops competindo umas com as outras, e a Nike pode facilmente fazer negócio com outras delas. O poder oligopsônico de preços da Nike significa que a empresa pode estabelecer o preço que paga a uma sweatshop por um par de tênis tão baixo quanto desejar. E a mesma “propriedade intelectual” dá a ela poder de preço de oligopólio nos Estados Unidos para vender os tênis com preço de varejo milhares de por cento acima do custo real de produção. A margem entre o que ela paga às sweatshops pelos sapatos e o quanto ela extorque dos consumidores ocidentais não é estabelecida pelo “mercado.” É estabelecida pela Nike. Ela pode estabelecer essa margem tão alto ou tão baixo quanto desejar.

E a expressão decisiva aqui é “tão alto.” A Nike preferirá maximizar a margem que ganha em seus tênis, mesmo à custa de pessoas que residem em habitações locupletadas e trabalham centenas de horas por semana por poucos dólares por dia — e por vezes têm morte lenta e horrível às centenas nos escombros de suas confecções.

A chamada “propriedade intelectual” não é propriedade legítima, e sim monopólio imposto pelo estado, exatamente tão protecionista quanto as tarifas industriais de há um século. Do mesmo modo que a tarifa, a “propriedade intelectual” cria escassez artificial em bens que não são escassos por natureza, permitindo que corporações privilegiadas extraiam rentismo dessa escassez. As corporações globais do século 21 são tão dependentes da “propriedade intelectual” para seus lucros quanto as antigas corporações industriais nacionais do início do século 20 o eram das tarifas. As tarifas pararam de ser úteis à grande empresa, e a “propriedade intelectual” tornou-se útil, porque as corporações se tornaram globais. Pelo fato de o “comércio internacional” em realidade consistir em sua maior parte de transferência interna de bens entre subsidiárias locais de corporações globais, as tarifas não mais servem aos interesses das corporações gigantes. Do mesmo modo que a tarifa, a “propriedade intelectual” é uma restrição governamental acerca de quem tem licença para vender dado tipo de bem em dado mercado, permitindo ao beneficiário cobrar o que quer que os consumidores possam pagar. Diferentemente da tarifa, contudo, que era uma forma de protecionismo que regulava a transferência de bens através de fronteiras nacionais, a “propriedade intelectual” regula a transferência de bens através de fronteiras corporativas.

Diferentemente das corporações industriais de há cem anos, empresas como a Nike na verdade não fazem coisas. Elas usam direitos artificiais de propriedade tais como a “propriedade intelectual” para controlar as condições sob as quais outras pessoas podem fazer coisas, e para criar postos de pedágio entre as pessoas que fazem as coisas e as pessoas que consomem as coisas. O dinheiro realmente, realmente grande não está na capacidade de produzir, e sim na capacidade de coletar tributo para permitir que a produção aconteça.

Sem a “propriedade intelectual,” aquelas confecções em Bangladesh poderiam ignorar a marca registrada Nike e comerciar calçados idênticos com a população local por minúscula fração do preço. E sem a Nike para impor preços uniformes em toda a indústria, elas teriam de competir por trabalhadores locais. Não haveria problema nenhum se a Nike resolvesse “diminuir sua presença” e sair de Bangladesh. O meio de vida dos trabalhadores não mais seria mantido refém do que a Nike fizesse ou deixasse de fazer.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 20 de maio de 2013.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

“some 4,500 garment factories employ approximately 4 million workers. In the grand scheme of things, they are better off with the factories than they would be without them; the benefits outweigh the risks. In fact, compared to other opportunities in Bangladesh, the garment industry pays reasonably well.”

If U.S. companies like Nike reduce their footprint in Bangladesh and abandon factories there out of fear of bad publicity, “hundreds of thousands of garment workers could lose their jobs and be thrust into worse alternatives.”

Well, yeah — true as far as it goes. When a mugger says “your money or your life,” I’m better off handing over the money and staying alive — but it’s the guy with the gun who artificially set the range of alternatives. The question you should be asking yourself, and people like Powell and the people in the C-suite at Nike don’t want you asking, is who decides what other alternatives are available in Bangladesh?

It isn’t some faceless, inevitable fact of nature that is forced on the sweatshops — or on Nike — by an anonymous market. Thanks to international trademark and patent law, Nike and a few other companies are the only game in town when it comes to hiring people to make shoes. They can take Nike’s price or leave it. But there’s lots of competing sweatshops, and Nike can easily take its business elsewhere. Nike’s oligopsony pricing power means they can set the price they pay a sweatshop for a pair of sneakers as low as they like. And the same “intellectual property” gives them oligopoly pricing power in the United States to sell the sneakers at a retail price thousands of percent above the actual cost of production. The margin between what they pay sweatshops for the shoes and how much they gouge Western customers isn’t set by “the market.” It’s set by Nike. They can set that margin as high or as low as they want.

And the operative phrase here is “as high.” Nike would rather maximize the margin it makes on its sneakers, even at the cost of people living in barracks working hundreds of hours a week for a few dollars a day — and sometimes dying slow, horrible deaths by the hundreds in the rubble of their factories.

So-called “intellectual property” is not legitimate property at all, but a state-enforced monopoly every bit as protectionist as the industrial tariffs of a century ago. Like the tariff, “intellectual property” creates artificial scarcity in goods that are not scarce by nature, enabling privileged corporations to extract rents from that scarcity. The global corporations of the 21st century are as dependent on “intellectual property” for their profits as the old national industrial corporations of the early 20th century were on tariffs. Tariffs ceased to be useful to big business, and “intellectual property” became useful, because corporations became global. Because “international trade” actually consists mostly of internal transfer of goods between local subsidiaries of global corporations, tariffs no longer serve the interests of giant corporations. Like the tariff, “intellectual property” is a government restriction on who may sell a given type of good in a given market, enabling the beneficiary to charge whatever consumers can pay. But unlike the tariff, which was a form of protectionism that regulated the transfer of goods across national boundaries, “intellectual property” regulates the transfer of goods across corporate boundaries.

Unlike the industrial corporations of a hundred years ago, companies like Nike don’t actually make things. They use artificial property rights like “intellectual property” to control the conditions under which other people can make things, and to set up toll gates between the people who make things and the people who consume things. The really, really big money isn’t the ability to produce, but the ability to collect tribute for allowing production to take place.

Without “intellectual property,” those factories in Bangladesh could ignore Nike’s trademark and market identical shoes to the local population at a tiny fraction of the price. And without Nike to impose uniform pricing across the industry, they’d have to compete for local workers. It wouldn’t matter if Nike decided to “reduce its footprint” and pull out of Bangladesh. The workers’ livelihoods would no longer be held hostage to what Nike did or didn’t do.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Oficinas de Exploração Laboral – Sweatshops a “Melhor Alternativa Disponível”? Mas Quem Decide Que Alternativas estão Disponíveis?