“Rocky Road” Please respond to the following:

Based on the Webtext materials and article below, address the following: Some of the most serious abuses taking place in developing countries deal with child labor, human slavery, bad governance, and environmental degradation. However, not all authorities feel that the use of sweatshops is necessarily a bad thing. What accounts for this reasoning? Due 6-3-15, Answer in two to three paragraphs no plagiarism.

In Defense of sweatshops

By Benjamin Powell June 2008

I do not want to work in a third world “sweatshop.” If you are reading this on a computer, chances are you don’t either. Sweatshops have deplorable working conditions and extremely low pay — compared to the alternative employment available to me and probably you. That is why we choose not to work in sweatshops. All too often the fact that we have better alternatives leads first world activists to conclude that there must be better alternatives for third world workers too.

Economists across the political spectrum have pointed out that for many sweatshop workers the alternatives are much, much worse. In one famous 1993 case U.S. senator Tom Harkin proposed banning imports from countries that employed children in sweatshops. In response a factory in Bangladesh laid off 50,000 children. What was their next best alternative? According to the British charity Oxfam a large number of them became prostitutes.

The national media spotlight focused on sweatshops in 1996 after Charles Kernaghan, of the National Labor Committee, accused Kathy Lee Gifford of exploiting children in Honduran sweatshops. He flew a 15 year old worker, Wendy Diaz, to the United States to meet Kathy Lee. Kathy Lee exploded into tears and apologized on the air, promising to pay higher wages.

Should Kathy Lee have cried? Her Honduran workers earned 31 cents per hour. At 10 hours per day, which is not uncommon in a sweatshop, a worker would earn $3.10. Yet nearly a quarter of Hondurans earn less than $1 per day and nearly half earn less than

$2 per day. Wendy Diaz’s message should have been, “Don’t cry for me, Kathy Lee. Cry for the Hondurans not fortunate enough to work for you.” Instead the U.S. media compared $3.10 per day to U.S. alternatives, not Honduran alternatives. But U.S. alternatives are irrelevant. No one is offering these workers green cards.

What are the Alternatives to Sweatshops?