EK, you're conflating Burma and Cambodia.

Otherwise, right on.

Reminds me of this old Krugman piece: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

It's not at all clear to me that the U.S. needs to lose jobs when Burma -- or Cambodia, or whoever -- gains them. We may well not be competing on those jobs. We don't compete on cheap plastic toys anymore, do we?

Why wouldn't, say, China be the loser if a poor country is the winner? So if you're making a political point about selling free trade to the American people, you've not convinced me.

As for the broader point that trade is zero-sum: that seems doubtful to me, though I don't really have the economic arsenal to argue it here. The fact that GDPs tend to grow over time, though, would suggest that this is a positive-sum game.

This argument was fairly well laid out in Sachs' book as well. The argument being that while sweatshops may represent the bottom rung of economic development for the poor in many nations, without them they do not even have the chance to climb to the second-lowest rung (whatever that may be), and are caught in an extreme poverty trap.

maybe Kristof could adopt some of these Cambodian children. Are they not as deserving as Thai hookers?

I can understand why it isn't enjoyable, but why do you find simple reality "troubling"?

It is flatly impossible for any society to go from soul-crushing povery to middle-class prosperity without a whole lot of terrible crap happening to a whole lot of people. What, you think folks can go from living atop garbage dumps one day to being urban professionals the next?

Mike

Framing arguments for lower labor standards as an act of charity towards the third world strikes me as pretty damned disingenuous.

The subtext is always "We must make you worse off, to help them! Don't you care about THEM!?"

Wouldn't a true conservative be saying that the elevation of Cambodia's people is Cambodia's problem, not that of US companies?

I can understand why it isn't enjoyable, but why do you find simple reality "troubling"? It is flatly impossible for any society to go from soul-crushing povery to middle-class prosperity without a whole lot of terrible crap happening to a whole lot of people.

Most people find "a whole lot of terrible crap happening to a whole lot of people" to be intrinsically troubling.

Negative-sum. Not zero.

Much of this makes a lot of sense, but the problem is that Nick conflates "sweatshop" with "low-wage factory with low-skill labor." The problem with sweatshops isn't the pay, it's that when workers can be kept on the subsistence frontier they're extremely vulnerable to other forms of exploitation. Unreasonably long work-days, abuse by managers, the burdens of risk of illness, injury, disruptions to work availability, etc. being shifted onto the workers, poor safety conditions--these are the things that most need to be improved and which can be with minimal effect on manufacturing costs.

It's also the case that lower standards and no standards are not the same. Adjusting standards thoughtfully to local conditions may be OK; eliminating standards so as to cause significant harm is not, ever.

Alternatively, organizing these kids as a criminal enterprise to rob the homes of the wealthy in the US would be harmful to the wealthy, but better for them than scrounging garbage heaps.

Of course, this is for some reason seen as quite obviously not a valid policy option (it's apparently unsustainable), whereas a trickle-down policy of systematically exploiting people is seen as totally sustainable (in spite of, in the US alone, such policies leading to a crippling Civil War, one Great Depression one near-Great Depression, and untold decades of massive opportunity costs).

The central challenge in poor countries isn't that sweatshops fail to exploit enough people. It's that "well, let them starve to death" is seen by everyone as a valid policy option. Once that's on the table, then anything we wouldn't call "a fate worse than death" looks awesome in comparison.

But, uh, doesn't make it awesome. And it's very "white man's burden" to pretend it is so. And to likewise pretend that the central conflict here is poor people in the US vs. dirt poor people in Cambodia.

"Most people find "a whole lot of terrible crap happening to a whole lot of people" to be intrinsically troubling."

No, they don't. That's because "a whole lot of terrible crap happening to a whole lot of people" is also known as "life".

Let me see if I can explain the difference. I'm unhappy that sweatshops are the best economic opportunity available to some people. I'm also unhappy I don't get to wake up every morning next to Bonnie Hunt. However, neither of those things trouble me.

Mike

Working for someone else, either in sweatshops or in more humanely run factories, is not the only option.

In India and elsewhere, "microlending" is successful because many third world areas are much more entreprenural than the developed world. In particular, in the United States "working" means holding down a job (i.e. hired by someone else to perform whatever tasks).

While living in a garbage dump is entreprenurism in the extreme, to survive there means you have certain skills that may be better served in non-traditional ways.

The "dumps or the sweatshops" Kristov is talking about is a false dichotomy.

This is nothing but the old “harmony of interests” argument: that capital and labor have the same interests, which just happen to be the complete dominance of capital over labor.
It is an intellectually absurd argument: the idea that allowing Cambodian companies to violate the human rights of the working class will somehow reduce poverty. That the way to help the extremely poor is to fuck over the merely poor, in a way that conveniently serves the interests of the most powerful people on the planet. Kristof gets away with it by setting up the choices as this: either we exploit the garbage pickers in a sweatshop, or we don’t give them a thing. In other words, if they aren’t making some factory owner rich, then there is no way out. Thinkers less wedded to a neo-liberal ideology might be able to think of solutions to the problem that don’t involve violating their basic human right to form a union. Perhaps public works, welfare payments, or, “gasp,” publically owned industries that could employ the poor. And the fact that companies will move away from countries with labor standards, as he fears will happen, is the best argument I’ve heard for why we need international labor standards, why we should globalize labor and environmental rights as we globalize the free flow of capital and information.
But this is Kristof’s favorite game. To attack organizations- labor unions, feminists groups, whoever- who are advocating for justice, because they ignore some even more disadvantaged group that only Nick Kristof has the moral fibers to defend. By setting up some disadvantaged person far far away as the platonic embodiment of injustice, attacking groups who are tackling more manageable forms of inequality for being insufficiently attentive to this Victim of All Victims whom Kristoff has picked, and in the process prevent any progress from being made at all.

I think the point is ultimately that labor standards aren't the right place to be looking for the sources of these problems. I remember once reading (I believe it was in this book) about a case in Laos where the government was going to go through with a major world bank-backed dam project that would move a number of people off their land. A couple of world bank anthropologists went in beforehand to look around. They found people who were poor, but had a number of emergency sources of subsistence income. Once the dam was built, however, these people were going to be moved to totally unfamiliar terrain, and about half would be dead within three years; these are primary candidates for the urban slums.

The point of that little anecdote is that by the time you're asking "high or low labor standards for the slum dwellers," you've already implicitly answered several questions about land reform and (more to the point) international support for regressive land policies in the form of breaking down traditional land tenure systems in favor of a Western freehold system that favors powerful landlords.

That's probably too much of a mouthful for a somewhat off-topic blog comment, and I apologize, but my point is that though the anti-globalization movement sometimes becomes the caricature that its opponents portray, Kristof (and Krugman in the linked column) are papering over a somewhat more fundamental critique of the way that Western institutions, without really thinking about it, create the third world proletariat by implementing land tenure systems and what-not that have a tendency to deny people their subsistence in the countryside.

I think Rob_k's comment is terrific.

Anyway, being a nerd I can't let a hair go unsplit: he's not arguing that sweatshops are good, he's arguing that they're better than the alternative.

Its a policy choice to make labor standards, to the extent possible, a zero-sum game.

Under balanced trade in finished goods, there is no zero sum to it ... raising or lowering the labor standards in a trade partner nation might shift their comparative advantages, but it would not eliminate the basis for trade ... as it can, when there is unbalanced absolute advantage trade in dependent component parts of finished goods.

I like the liberal take on this.

W\"We condone sweatshops, but understand that if be close them, the workers' lives will be worse.....so we'll keep buying Nike's but we won't like it....no Sir, we will bite our lower lip to show the world how concerned we are....but we still buy them."

I like the liberal take on this.

"We don't condone sweatshops, but understand that if be close them, the workers' lives will be worse.....so we'll keep buying Nike's but we won't like it....no Sir, we will bite our lower lip to show the world how concerned we are....but we still buy them."

To all of those dinging Mr. Kristol -- you should be so giving to do what he's done to point out life's inequities. I seriously doubt you pathetic sorts have done anything for your fellow man except sit behind your computer and make jabs at those who do.

In terms of Cambodian dump children, I support a wonderful group there Cambodian Children's Fund that takes kids from the dump and puts them in school with food, clothing and shelter. It is an incredible group...having walked the dump and the surrounding slum, the director, Scott Neesom, has now "saved" over 400 kids and provides day care for those left all day while parents scrounge.

In terms of of the self righteousness about sweat shops... these folks have NOTHING, so any work is "good." I was in Phnom Penh with another NGO who told the story that a BBC expose got one of the shops closed adn threw 100s out of work. The people were devastated and left without another source of income or any help.

Be careful what you say and do on behalf of the people when you have no idea of circumstances and need.

Wow, what an original point, I've like never heard it before except in um ten billion glibertarian apologias for neoliberal economic exploitation, and every single Thomas Friedman column ever written.

Apart from that, what a valuable contribution.

As someone who is usually an extremely satisfied reader of this blog, I just have to object and say that Ezra Klein is completely full of shit on this issue, and I'm shocked that a guy who is such a clear thinker on everything from health care to the Israel-Palestine conflict would fall for an obvious false dichotomy to defend a Washington Consensus completely based on the same supply-side theories and multinational corporate views that he deplores and rejects at home.

I really hope he engages this issue further because as the majority of the comments show, he absolutely has this wrong. I mean how does the giant heap of trash get there in the first place? It's as if one argued that a fish caught in the giant chunk of plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean would be better off caught by fisherman and eventually eaten because that giant chunk of plastic is not such a good place to live. Unhinged industrial market capitalism is a problematic system. And it's not just a problem in our country. It's a global issue.

Kristof's journalistic background is based on a large number of years he spent in China seeing the country improve economically. Now, of course, it did this by ramping up a bunch of poorly-regulated, partially-state-owned factories, and I suspect that he sees all economic development in these terms. "Me" at 1:56 I think covered most of Kristof's shortcomings pretty well.

so we'll keep buying Nike's but we won't like it

Actually, many executives from Nike started to reform their use of sweatshop labor because large numbers of people, upset at those practices, sent their shoes back to Nike, and explained why. But right-wingers will mock lefties for doing that, too. Or spending their time finding products that aren't made by such labor, and so on. In short, there's little point in addressing you "concerns," because simply if liberals do it, you will get upset by it.

you should be so giving to do what he's done to point out life's inequities.

The reason we should avoid pride is because we might fall into the trap that Kristof has fallen into and the trap you have fallen into about Kristof-- the belief that he is the only person concerned about their plight. Kristof's shtick has been to engage in outrage and criticism about others, who are not him, who are looking out for the plight of world poverty.

Just joining the chorus to say that this Kristof column is full of shit and Klein reveals himself to have not thought seriously about international labor issues by praising it. Awk-ward!

"a whole lot of terrible crap happening to a whole lot of people" is also known as "life".

I have to agree with that, though not necessarily in the same terms. It's not a huge amount of time since Orwell wrote about people scavenging for coal on the slag heaps of northern England.

But Rob_k's comment really is terrific: by the time you start talking about the people on the trashpile -- or Orwell's coal-pickers -- you're already drawing a line under a host of questions about the structures and terms of global capitalism, which have imposing themselves upon colonial suppliers ever since the days of the great proto-imperial trading companies.

That's because "a whole lot of terrible crap happening to a whole lot of people" is also known as "life".

Life is never troubling?

Let me see if I can explain the difference. I'm unhappy that sweatshops are the best economic opportunity available to some people. I'm also unhappy I don't get to wake up every morning next to Bonnie Hunt. However, neither of those things trouble me.

Bonnie Hunt? WTF? I'm positively glad I don't wake up every morning next to Bonnie Hunt.

by the time you start talking about the people on the trashpile -- or Orwell's coal-pickers -- you're already drawing a line under a host of questions about the structures and terms of global capitalism...

You don't get to sit there and simply criticize with out an alternative. Let's have an answer as well as a criticism.

So, what's your answer?,

by the time you start talking about the people on the trashpile -- or Orwell's coal-pickers -- you're already drawing a line under a host of questions about the structures and terms of global capitalism...

You don't get to sit there and simply criticize with out an alternative. Let's have an answer as well as a criticism.

So, what's your answer?,

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