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When New York Times journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn went to Asia to live, they were outraged when they first arrived at the sweatshop conditions Asian factory workers worked under. Like most westerners, the thought of 14+ hour shifts six or seven days a week with no overtime pay seemed unconscionable.
After spending some time in the region, however, Kristof and Wudunn slowly came to the conclusion that, while regrettable, sweatshops are an important part of a developing nation’s journey to prosperity. The two later documented the role of sweatshops in emerging economies in their book Thunder from the East. Kristof and Wudunn relay one anecdote that helped them reach their conclusion in the New York Times:
One of the half-dozen men and women sitting on a bench eating was a sinewy, bare-chested laborer in his late 30's named Mongkol Latlakorn. It was a hot, lazy day, and so we started chatting idly about the food and, eventually, our families. Mongkol mentioned that his daughter, Darin, was 15, and his voice softened as he spoke of her. She was beautiful and smart, and her father's hopes rested on her.
"Is she in school?" we asked.
"Oh, no," Mongkol said, his eyes sparkling with amusement. "She's working in a factory in Bangkok. She's making clothing for export to America." He explained that she was paid $2 a day for a nine-hour shift, six days a week.
"It's dangerous work," Mongkol added. "Twice the needles went right through her hands. But the managers bandaged up her hands, and both times she got better again and went back to work."
"How terrible," we murmured sympathetically.
Mongkol looked up, puzzled. "It's good pay," he said. "I hope she can keep that job. There's all this talk about factories closing now, and she said there are rumors that her factory might close. I hope that doesn't happen. I don't know what she would do then."
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In the early 1990s, the United States Congress considered a piece of legislation called the "Child Labor Deterrence Act," which would have taken punitive action against companies benefiting from child labor. The Act never passed, but the public debate it triggered put enormous pressure on a number of multinational corporations. One German garment maker that would have been hit with trade repercussions if the Act had passed laid off 50,000 child workers in Bangladesh. The British charity organization Oxfam later conducted a study which found that thousands of those laid-off children later became prostitutes, turned to crime, or starved to death.
The United Nations organization UNICEF reports that an international boycott of the Nepalese carpet industry in the mid-1990s caused several plants to shut down, and forced thousands of Nepalese girls into prostitution.
In 1995, a consortium of anti-sweatshop groups threw the spotlight on football (soccer) stitching plants in Pakistan. In particular, the effort targeted enforcing a ban on sweatshop soccer balls by the time the 1998 World Cup began in France. In response, Nike and Reebok shut down their plants in Pakistan and several other companies followed suit. The result: tens of thousands of Pakistanis were again unemployed. According to UPI, mean family income in Pakistan fell by more than 20%.
