boo boo

Also. Even though what you said about sweatshops is correct. It makes jobs only for people in other countries. And call me a selfish jackass but thats not our responsibility, we need to look after our own. And downsizing and offshoring claims more jobs than illegal immigration ever will.

Besides, taking all the cons of sweatshops like horrid working conditions and low wages into consideration. Simply being employed dosen't seem to be that much of a pro.

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TheBig3

Case in point, your Honor.

Well we're making a case for capitalism. I'm not saying that this is what we should do, im saying this is how to fix the issue of third world poverty. All nations fight a bloody battle through industrialization. The idea that you can go from agricultural society to post-industrial without the in between is the garbage rhetoric of the uneducated. Not only does it assume that a nation has the resources, but has been hiding them.

If they made American wages, companies would just employ workers here. The third world would still die of malaria, there'd just be no way to give them help without aid dropping medical aid. Thats no solution...teach a man to fish and he eats for a day...

I don't think I understand what you're getting at in the last statement though. Are you saying the working conditions make having the job too sucky to be redeemable?

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DontRunMeOver

Big3, do you share my opinion that the problem regarding sweatshops isn't the pay, it's just the conditions? People generally wouldn't go and work in sweatshops if there were more financially viable alternatives available. They work there because however bad the pay may be in our terms, it's ok pay for where they are, or at least better than the alternatives.

If people are working in bad conditions for low pay, the bigger problem is that they are working in bad conditions. Companies can defend low pay because it fits into their financial planning - lower pay can lead to more profit and this would hopefully lead to a more stable company which is able to offer more jobs which are more secure (I don't know much about economics so if anybody sees a flaw please mention it). Companies can't really defend not giving decent working conditions to their employees though, or at least improving the conditions as much as would be possible without incurring any major costs.

I think your idea of more sweatshops being opened to increase demand for labour could work, but only if the sweatshops are geographically situated such that workers would be able to choose between different sweatshops. In 3rd world countries it takes so long to travel between villages and different parts of each city that unless the sweatshops were almost side by side, or people were to relocate just to try out different sweatshops, then the competition for employees wouldn't work that well.

Or did you mean that more sweatshops offers the more ethical distributors an opportunity to choose one which gives better working conditions to its staff? The purely capitalist would still go for the one offering the best value item, which chances are would be the one paying the least to its workers.

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boo boo

Pretty much. Seriously, it's not really helping anyone over there, while people here who need jobs aren't getting them because all the corporate think tanks know that they can get someone in Bangladash who will do the same job for less than half the wages an American get.

Don't lie to yourself. Companies don't relocate to other countries because they want to help them, they just want to save money.

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