Jobs Leave Third World, Radicals Cheer

by Noah Hutson-Ellenberg

The Workers Rights Consortium has two full-time employees and operates out of an upstairs utility room of a socially-minded New York City church—a recipe, if history is any guide, for a peculiar brand of political greatness.

These two right-minded individuals (and presumably their spiritual advisor) have spent the last year swaggering through the heady political climate of the moment—international trade and labor law—with banners of righteousness duly raised.

A little history is in order. A year ago, student activists around the country (seizing on convenient local targets) were clamoring to get their college administrations to stop contracting for sweatshirts and pennants with companies, like Champion and Nike, that employed Third-World labor, with dubious human-rights oversight. So the United States Department of Labor—venerable organization that it is—brought the key players to the table: professional protestors, union officials, college administrators, and the apparel companies.

The group laid out a series of standards—the apparel manufacturers agreed to allow bathroom breaks and to let labor monitors into all of the factories, and the protestors agreed to stop staging hunger strikes and otherwise being unpleasant, and the Department of Labor made everyone shake hands and go home, satisfied.

This was the Fair Labor Agreement of 1999. The Labor Department thought, wisely, that if the agreement was to have any teeth, colleges would have to agree to abide by it. And, fair agreement that it was, more than 170 colleges, Dartmouth College and most of the big apparel contractors among them, signed up.

But a dissenting group of students decided that they had an aesthetic difference with the accords. “Too corporate,” said the new radicals (that's the real objection, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education). They teamed up, found a sympathetic spiritual guide, plopped down in his attic, and formed the WRC, an accord with more stringent provisions than the Fair Labor Agreement.

The WRC has now signed up 33 members, and a group of Dartmouth activists, who just held a demonstration of twenty students for an audience of two cameras from the Daily Dartmouth, have been prompted to unite by concerns that the Hanover student left is not sufficiently vocal, particularly in the momentary context of the national anti-sweatshop movement.

The College's official reps, of course, are listening with open ears: College Counsel Sean Gorman has called the FLA “not perfect,” and new Dean James Larimore (who got his career's start championing the rights of Native American students at the University of Texas' El Paso campus) admits sympathies with the anti-sweatshop movement.

Dartmouth, of course, does not operate in a vacuum; at a long list of other colleges around the country, radical students are resorting to the reaching rhetoric and cliched forms of 1960s campus protest ideology.

At Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, 40 protestors are camped out in the middle of the college's green, refusing to eat until the University joins the WRC. “The hunger strikers are committed to results,” says Marikah Mancini, a spokesperson for the group.

Students at the University of Iowa have continued to stage a sit-in protest outside the office of University President Mary Sue Coleman—even though Iowa has joined the WRC. The protestors have insisted that Iowa withdraw from the FLA convention as well—a step administrators have been reluctant to take.

Nike declined to renew its contract to supply apparel for Brown University after protestors there pressured the administration into joining the WRC. Nike said it thinks that convention unfair; the company will not, it avers, be held hostage by mob threats.

These protesters claim to be pursuing a valuable, if not essential, humanitarian good. But most economic thinkers say their theories are out of whack with reality, and that the strict accords the WRC insists upon are more applicable to fantasies than to the economic realities of third world labor markets, and the present global economy.

Furthermore, economists say, multinational employment is so essential to improving the economic lot of workers in developing countries that forcing the textile industry out of the Third World will only cause serious economic harm and hardship for those workers. The upshot is that the student protestors seem to be aiming not to make things better for the workers, but simply to assuage their own consciences.

The sweatshop issue, of course, has larger significance in this particular political moment, since the arguments of the WRC's student activists echoes the diatribes of the professional activists slinging slogans against the World Bank and IMF in Washington this week.

The problem, with the IMF protestors as well as the campus sweatshop radicals, is that they are being desperately unrealistic. The first stages of industrialization can certainly be grimy and distasteful, but they are as necessary as they are unpleasant.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laureate in economics and New York Times columnist (and hardly a raging right-winger) devotes a piece in his recent collection, 1998's The Accidental Theorist, to the problem. The essay has a fitting title—“In Praise of Cheap Labor: Bad Jobs at Bad Wages are Better than no Jobs at All.”

Krugman takes the left-wing rhetoric, which has multimillionaire, multinational companies literally raping the workers of the Third World, abusing them psychologically and physically with no real compensation, and stands it on its head.

“The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through,” Krugman writes. “While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, third world workers.”

Krugman takes the benefits to third world laborers of increased job opportunities to be economic fact.

“The benefits of export-led economic growth to the mass of people in the newly industrializing economies are not a matter of conjecture. A country like Indonesia is still so poor that progress can be measured in terms of how much the average person gets to eat; since 1970, per capita intake has risen from less than 2,100 calories per day to more than 2,800. A shocking one-third of young children are still malnourished—but in 1975, the fraction was more than half. Similar improvements can be seen throughout the Pacific Rim, and even in places like Bangladesh,” Krugman writes.

Concluding his argument, Krugman points out that the importation of factories and investment from the First World has been proven to have a palpable nation-wide effect on labor markets and other key economic indicators. The entire population of a Third-World country, Krugman says, benefits from multinational investment, not just the hired workers.

“The advantages of established First World industries are still formidable,” Krugman writes. “The only reason developing countries have been able to compete with those industries is their ability to offer employers cheap labor. Deny them that ability, and you might well deny them the prospect of continuing industrial growth, even reverse the growth that has been achieved. And since export-oriented growth, for all its injustice, has been a huge boon for the workers in those nations, anything that curtails that growth is very much against their interests.”

Krugman's theories have been supported by some impressively innovative journalism.

Glenn Garvin, the Nicaragua bureau chief for the Miami Herald, produced a series of articles last fall in which he traveled to “sweatshops” operated by Nike-like American companies in Managua and more distant Nicaraguan outposts and interviewed the workers he found there. Garvin found a culture of people far more concerned about what might happen to them if Nike and other American textile companies were forced to pull out of Nicaragua than about their present condition.

It is difficult to disagree with the specific aims of the anti-sweatshop movement. There ought to be some humanitarian oversight for all workers, even those in distant Third-World factories. No workers should be made to work all day with out being allowed to leave their station to go to the bathroom, or in conditions that may prove hazardous to her health.

But these basic humanitarian concerns were adequately addressed by the Fair Labor Agreement. The current campus anti-sweatshop movement, with its two directors in their church in lower Manhattan and its aim to promote the Workers Rights Consortium, is not humanitarian. It is wrong-headed political posturing.

The Workers Rights Consortium will have only one effect on the Third-World workers it claims to represent, and that is far from a humanitarian one: it will cost them their jobs.

For the Ivy League protestors, that may be a reasonable price to pay to ensure the security of their own consciences. But it certainly isn't worth it for the workers.

Paul Krugman puts it better than we can:

“Why does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for sixty cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of thirty cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land—or of a Filipino scavenging on a garbage heap?

“The main answer, I think, is a sort of fastidiousness. Unlike the starving subsistence farmer, the women and children in the sneaker factory are working at slave wages for our benefit—and this makes us feel unclean.”