Capitalist Complacency

Three Ways Sweatshops Help The Poor Escape Poverty

The above video is a horrid defense of neoliberal capitalism. The speaker (who gave him a doctorate and why I don't know) argues that there's no other option for the poor working in sweatshops in third world countries because they would starve to death if fired from their job. Case in point? Workers fired from sweatshops earned much less income per month than workers who continued to be mistreated in what is tantamount to slave labor. Therefore, sweatshops help the poor "escape" poverty because, well, at least they're not dead! Never mind the pitiful wage, the horrid working conditions, and absence of health-care benefits and job security.

The scope of the argument is incredibly narrow, basing its premise solely on amount of income earned. Framed within the message the speaker wishes to present (thus his approach inherently invalidates his point), the current scenarios exist within a vacuum and so the causes which brought about these circumstances are not to be examined. Further, these actions are not voluntary, so they can't even be regarded as free-market phenomena. It's about as voluntary as someone placing a gun to my temple to force me to vote (which is more or less what some parts of Australia do now). The term is completely bankrupt of meaning here. This is just a poor attempt to sugarcoat the harmful externalities that capitalism generates.

The filmstrip was released by an organization called "LearnLiberty", which identifies with right-libertarianism (pretty much the opposite of even a diluted notion of liberty). Even more contradictory is that the speaker suspiciously forgets to mention that the reason working conditions are so poor in third world countries is because the investors into third-world labor purposely undermine worker's rights, a consequence of the expansion of neoliberal policies.

They push tariffs and other trade-barriers to prevent more authentic free market outcomes in a positive direction. The ones with the most capital to overcome these tariffs are the ones with the monopoly on third world labor: the neoliberal investors abetted by the sweatshop operators who exploit the workers. Right-libertarians would oppose state interference since it's seen as the sole barrier to genuine participation in the free market. Instead, we see a right-libertarian defending conditions brought about by state intervention.

I oppose the complacency that the video defends and even encourages. It aims to soothe criticism of present conditions, not utilize it to work toward fairer ones. This isn't an issue of sweatshop labor vs. starvation. Wage-labor effectively boils down to that, no matter if one talks of a first-world office cubicle or a third-world slum-house. It's the broader problematic of addressing the conditions which perpetuate these inequalities that should be the focus of these discussions. Limiting the scope of the issue to only what's readily apparent hardly yields creative insight into potential solutions to these problems. These are not issues to be taken at face value if we know the real goal is to move beyond these terrible conditions.