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 Originally Posted by Renton
This is more employment of the "economics is a zero sum game" fallacy. Sweatshop labor is transitional in third world countries because the countries get richer at a very fast pace. See the double digit growth rates in the economies of these countries. Once wealth and human capital accumulates past a certain point, these countries are no longer candidates to be massive export economies anymore and they transition to being more like modern Western economies.
This isn't due to them being sweatshops though. Sweatshops do not play a pivotal role whatsoever in the growth of these economies. Industrialization does, but that isn't the same as abusive labor. Furthermore, for various reasons, the growth of the economies is largely dependent upon the non-abusive conditions of related economies.
I am not romanticizing sweatshops, I'm only suggesting that there aren't any good alternatives for increasing the standard of living and wealth of a society.
There most certainly are. Sweatshops are not just cheap labor. Cheap labor relative to economic imperatives is fantastic, but that also has nothing to do with sweatshops. All the factories employing people in poor countries do not have any need to engage in such abusive and deleterious practices. Them doing so merely turns their enormous profits into extra super enormous profits, and that's why they do it. And they would keep doing it forever and ever if they were somehow able to stifle the cries of those they abuse
This is fundamentally no different than slave owners arguing for why their slave plantations are beneficial. Not only is this stuff romanticizing terrible practices but it isn't even smart economics. I'm not sure if in my lifetime we'll ever figure out that suppliers would have nothing without consumers. That seems a silly thing to say until you begin to follow the logic of what it means when, on the macro scale, the act of spending inherently is the same as accruing income. It is only through an existence of laborers who are not in sweatshops who can buy products that those in sweatshops can be brought out of the sweatshops. This then means that the sweatshops are not themselves necessary even on a purely economic basis regardless of their rampant human rights violations
Even if we could decouple the human rights violations of sweatshops out of the equation, the basic bargain model is still what actually works and grows the economy, albeit much too slowly because the oppressors fight it tooth and nail. When basics of monetary and resource stability are met, every and any economy that has ever existed has been only as healthy as how much purchasing power the consumers had. Many of the very wealthy have never liked this fact and try to trick everybody into believing the opposite, so much so that they even believe it.
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