Let's Be Pro-Sweatshop

Karen Martinez

Professor Nordquist

Writing 115 (PCC)

19 March 2013

Let's Be Pro-Sweatshop

Each morning the average person wakes up and performs their daily routine. The alarm rings, the sheets are thrown off the bed and one shuffles straight to the shower. People become carried away with what's going on in their lives that they forget about what's going on around them. When getting dressed, does the average person stop and look at the tags their clothing displays? Do they ever wonder what materials were used in order to make the fabric? Better yet, does the average person ever ponder about where those shirts came from or whose hands made it? Many of these tags state the clothes are "made in Taiwan." More than ever before, sweatshops are booming. These shops are not limited to apparel alone either. They also provide us with sporting goods, electronics, shoes, sneakers, agricultural products, coffee, bananas, etc. We the people of the United States might be the ones who benefit from them the most. Sweatshops are beneficial to third-world countries for several key reasons.

First, developed nations such as the United States, believe that sweatshops generate poverty. However, those developed nations are wrong. Sweatshops are a stepping stone to economic development. Banning them would close one route out of poverty for the citizens in these countries. Sweatshops provide jobs for those in financial need in third-world countries. In addition, the shops would not be growing the way they are right now and people would be suffering even more without them. According to the Washington-based fund, Asia's economy has been forecasted to grow 5.4% this year and 5.9% in 2013, and expects China's economy, the world's second-largest, to grow at 7.8% this year and 8.2% in 2013. Thanks to these tens of thousands of sweatshops, Asia's economy has become one of the finest in the world.

Many Third World nations feel sweatshops are necessary, while many developed nations strongly oppose the practice. They believe that exploiting people is immoral and unethical. Accordingly, Sweatshop workers have a choice; the choice to work there or not, or, the choice to feed their family or not. The choice is simple. If the long hours of hard labor at low wages do not exceed the worker out of poverty, why would they choose to work there? Furthermore, In "Where Sweatshops Are A Dream" Nicholas D. Kristof states that families who live in the dump agree that working in a sweatshop is a cherished dream; an escalator out of poverty. Many parents in third-world countries hope their children grow up scavenging beside them to get a factory job, partly because they have seen other children run over by garbage trucks while hunting for pop cans near dump sites. Parents of children that have never been to a doctor or a dentist would also agree that a sweatshop job by comparison would be far more pleasant and less dangerous. So why take something away that benefits them? Sweatshops are essential to the survival of the poor in this delicate economy.

In the article "Two Cheers for Sweatshops" Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, sum up the misunderstanding of sweatshops by most of the modern world as two journalists who spent fourteen years in Asia doing research on sweatshops of that country.

"Yet sweatshops that seem brutal from the vantage point of an American sitting in his living room can appear tantalizing to a Thai laborer getting by on beetles." [Two Cheers for Sweatshops] The fact of the matter is that sweatshops in the eyes of the actual workers are not as bad as they are made out to be, by many activists. Organizations fear that until they treats their workers better, that country has no chance of becoming a just and stable society. These organizations