Originally Posted by npoak
Oh ya....those 15 year old chinese girls would be way better off spending 16 hours in a field making 20 cents a day. Oh wait...they would be SO better off being prostitutes. Ya, that's it. **** sweatshops....
Do you honestly think that if one of those 15 year old girls (kids) didn't have that job in the sweatshop...they would not work? They would sit at home listening to pop music talking to their friends on the phone and hanging out at the mall? Is your world view that simple? The reality as that in most of those places families are so poor that the kids work, generally they want too to help the family. Sweatshops suck, but they are better off there than on the street being hookers.
I'm going to take the bait and dive back into this one, as it's a viewpoint that really annoys me, and seems to be way too common.
As mentioned by a few others in response to your post, sweatshop labour is not better than nothing. Sweatshops are the creation of 1st world pressure on 3rd world countries. Third world countries get into heavy debt to the IMF, World Bank and other similar organisations. This happens in times of famine, drought, or often after a first-world instigated coup or "revolution" that sees hundreds of thousands of people dead and the country in a bloody shambles.
International corporations put pressure on heavily in-debt governments to create free-trade zones, giving the companies the ability to run their manufacturing arms without needing to pay tax, without needing to follow humanitarian laws or provide basic rights for those who work for them. Combine this with the mechanisation of many previously farming-based economies, as well as cash-crop farming enforced by rich landlords, and numerous otehr issues, and you're left with a lower class who are even poorer than they used to be.
Not only that, but they can no longer farm the food they eat as they are threatened with eviction from their lands if they aren't growing the crops their landlords (and in turn, multinationals) are demanding. Obviously this leads to one majorly ****ed up situation for these poor people.
More often than not, as you have mentioned, they have no other option but to work for minimal wages, hundreds of miles away from their families, with no medical support, disgusting conditions, no union support, women are often sexually abused by bosses, they have no choice in where they live, being forced to live in tiny dormitory rooms that their employers rent out to them for prices often exceeding 3/4 of their total pay, etc. The conditions are horrendous.
The demand for cheap labour in these zones (a demand created by the massive number of companies who continue to out-source to them for labour) also leads to human trafficking on a major scale. You may have seen the current "Stop The Trafik" campaign that's being run. Thousands of children are sold into slavery every year, or stolen from their families to work in places like sweatshops (not to mention child prostitution, child soldiers, camel jockeys and way too many other disgusting trades). The existance of sweatshops is one of the many things that keeps the trade in human lives active and alive. It's the biggest growing illegal trade in the world behind arms and drugs.
I don't know about you, but I don't feel so good about passing it off as "it's better than nothing". We made this problem. These companies are doing nothing to solve it, only perpetuate it. The least we can do is make some semblance of an effort to withdraw our support from them and at least spread some proper information about what exactly is going on in countries that aren't our own. They may seem far away, but people are dying for your shoes.