United Students Against Sweatshops Garment Worker Tour
Wednesday, February 8, 2006 at 5:00pm
UCLA Campus: Kerckhoff Grand Salon
The Social Justice Alliance is presenting a panel of three female garment workers from third-world countries.
No doubt, the purpose of the event is to demonstrate horrors of sweatshops. But they evade an important context--namely, what are these individuals' alternatives? Prostitution? Drug dealing?
Sweatshops, like child labor, might be a travesty in a developed nation, given the full context of available options, but is not categorically wrong on the basis of any principle--certainly it is better than a number of alternatives, including starvation and death.
In developing nations, the existence of sweatshops is an economic benefit made possible by the productivity of individuals from more advanced nations. The ability of sweatshops to prosper in these impoverished nations is made possible only because they offer an alternative--a benefit--that is preferable, even if repugnant to us by our developed-nation standards.
If this event turns out to be another attack on (free-market, laissez-faire) capitalism, we will expose this during the Q & A session--are these sweatshops operating under capitalistic principles? What are the supposed better alternatives to sweatshops and why don't the individuals of those nations continue to pursue those alternatives? If the Social Justice Alliance's answer is some form of statism--whose wealth do they expect to redistribute?
