![\"Francis](\"https://catholicstand.com/wp-content/uploads/Francis-Sweatshops.png\")
I hate sweatshops. I loathe the idea that a global or local economy should embrace industrial sweatshops along with the agricultural equivalent type of work that results in extremely low earnings coupled with excessive work hours and harsh working conditions. For more background on the subject of sweatshops in general, you can link here. To capture more of the emotion of what troubles me about the sweatshop acceptance mentality, here is a fine song and video put out by the band Radiohead All I Need.
The Bangladesh garment factory building collapse which killed 1,132 people recently could provide the necessary fuel for an American moment to reassess how we are getting things done in our general economy. I was pleased to note that this tragedy provoked some interest in Catholic media circles, and not just the usual suspects on the Catholic Left. Unfortunately, I don’t think that this sad event is going to have the same effect or call to public conscience as the 1911 New York City Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire which killed far fewer.
The question that begs asking when the issue of sweatshops is discussed is whether we really believe that the way of the sweatshop is the only way authentic economic development can proceed? Is the sweatshop the means to the end of a recognizable local, national, or global prosperity that everyone could potentially benefit from? If so, do the ends justify the means? Are we embracing an evil that good will come of it? Someone could ask: “Where’s the evil? People are freely choosing to work and are avoiding outright starvation or ending up selling their bodies on the streets.”
I would respond that there are more evils at play here.
In the typical sweatshop form of employment, a real person is not treated with dignity, they are not paid a wage that provides the basics of life for a family. In fact they must work such long hours that they have little or no time for their family life, raising their children, or starting a family. Some of the sweatshop “success” stories I’ve read about in pro-sweatshop articles, include features of men who have worked for years, even decades, with little or no contact with their families. They have pulled together a little money to start up a vegetable stand or some tiny business, or they were able to get a child or two into school. This “success” sounds like the story of men who have been long exploited, who have been willing to do anything to try to escape complete poverty for themselves and their families. I honor their part in the storyline, I don’t feel good about the larger responsibility borne by those who employ and those who tout the system as is. What is missing here?
To quote Pope Francis from the book, His Life in His Own Words: Conversations with Jorge Bergoglio:
“Right now I believe we must devote ourselves to a culture of cooperation or we are lost. The totalitarian approaches of the last century — fascism, Nazism, communism, and liberalism — lead to fragmentation. They are collective approaches masked as unification, principles without organization. The most human of challenges is organization. For example, unbridled capitalism fragments economic and social life, while the challenge of a society is the opposite: establishing ties of solidarity.”
I think what is missing in the sweatshop economy is this sense of having meaningful ties of solidarity. I experience it in the classroom, when I present the information about the condition of life for the workers who have had principle roles in making the products and clothes we purchase here in America, many of my students have a temporary sense of injustice, but it typically doesn’t last long. I have given huge extra credit offerings to entire classes just to start the ball rolling on discovering if their own school uniforms are made via sweatshops or not, and to begin the process of informing the faculty and administration and taking steps to look into sweatshop-free alternatives. The interest just hasn’t been there, not even with exceedingly generous enticements. The feedback I get from those who would like to do something is that all their friends basically come down to the conclusion that a) they can’t really do anything, and b) maybe the sweatshop workers are better off with the lousy jobs anyway.
I think one big problem in the American Catholic community is that the sweatshop issue has been one of those issues that liberal activist Catholics have embraced, while at the same time they have embraced a pro-choice and/or the homosexual agenda. A perfect example of this is Jim Keady. At first blush, Keady seems like the perfect Catholic role-model for motivating faithful Catholics to rally around an anti-sweatshop political movement. If you go to his website, I think you will be impressed. Check out the documentary on the home page “Nike Sweatshops: Behind the Swoosh.” He has posted updates to his work since making the documentary at the site and also here. He has positively motivated many young people with his work on exposing sweatshops as evidenced here as well. In the “Nike Sweatshop” documentary, Keady indicated that his awakening to the sweatshop immorality came about through his intensive study and embrace of Catholic social teachings.
So far, so good, but he now apparently is trying to have it both ways. I have seen him posting very public endorsements of Homosexual Marriage. I don’t believe he understands how his credibility in the larger Catholic sphere is undermined by taking the cafeteria approach to Catholic doctrines relating to marriage, family, and economics. The solidarity we need as American Catholics must be centered on the orthodox approach to the Catholic social doctrine. We’ve had enough of the left v. right ideological wars. Every Magisterial document I’ve read has criticized the attempts by the Left and Right to hijack the Church teachings. Pope Francis has had plenty of negative experiences in Argentina with partisanship taken to the extremes, and I’m sure he will speak out against this type of fragmentation that divides Christ’s Church.
I will leave off this post with a couple more links. First off, I would like to encourage all Catholic dioceses to follow the lead of the Archdiocese of Newark with their “Sweatshop Initiative”.
This initiative is the way to organize all of our Catholic schools to be empowered to purchase school uniforms that avoid being produced in sweatshop labor conditions or by children. Like with most reforms in our Hierarchical Church, we need Bishops who are men of action and contemplation. The Bishop can’t do it all himself, but he can get the ball rolling, and balls roll faster downhill than when you try to roll uphill. Speaking of the American Bishops, here is a link to their document on the economic conditions that create sweatshops in the first place.
Something to consider anyway. I think that there is a way to look at the issue of sweatshops that includes the addressing of the solidarity and the subsidiarity principles of our Catholic social doctrine. We have to be able to see that relying on extremely poor people overseas to do the work and provide the products we want, carries with it some serious responsibility. Corporations are consumer-sensitive, we know it because boycotts are often quite effective if they are widespread. We should challenge the notion that there is no way to at least pay these foreign workers better wages in safer conditions and keep prices affordable here in the U.S. If the wealth of the Walton family empire is any indication, the revenues generated at Walmart, Nike et al are so substantial that it would seem that increasing the justice in their factories and workplaces need not come at the expense of the average American customer — I’m just saying!
Development strategies would seem to work best if the local conditions of the people and the environment are placed in the first regard; this is part of what I take away from the subsidiarity principle in play in the real world. With the globalized economy, the sheer distance between the work/worker and the consumer seems to be one that brings back the emotional-spiritual divide that once existed between master and slave here in America. We have that legacy and I fear that tendency, to look at ourselves as somehow more deserving. It’s an old story really, a really old sin on the part of those better off. One of my students captured this unsettling attitude quite simply after viewing a video on a sweatshop worker saying, “Sucks being him”.
13 thoughts on “WWJD About Sweatshops?”
Pingback: A Catholic Amway To End Sweatshop Economics : Catholic Stand
It is well documented that as countries progress, sweatshops first arrive, thrive, then leave. This is not because they have been made illegal in general. It is because the huge pool of idle labor that drew them to the country to begin with has dissipated into more and more sophisticated and better paid opportunities that have a higher minimum standard for labor than the people could provide when they were at the start of their sweatshop period but have since acquired those skills in the sweatshops.
The worst thing is to leave people without work at all. The second worst thing is the sweatshop. If reform comes and it increases investment in these countries and soaks up excess labor faster than the sweatshops could do it, all to the good. If reform comes which drives the sweatshops out of business and leaves people poorly socialized for higher paying work and in greater poverty, that’s a cure worse than the disease.
I’m thinking that despite the fact that sweatshops can be seen as part of the process of a nation’s economic development- I’m thinking it isn’t a moral event to allow them to be in the mix when putting forward development strategies. By definition I’d put sweatshops in the category of exploitation of human beings in their person and their offering of their labor. In the book of interviews with Pope Francis I just read he has a lot to say about the spiritual quality of “work”- it is something that goes well beyond just a material event- it is a spiritual enterprise and calls into question the type of relationships formed in the partnerships of labor, capital, ownership, management, consumer and so forth. The question is whether we are really trapped in our economic theories to say that developing nations must take on, accept or even embrace a time of sweatshop economics? This time period could be the duration of an entire life span of at least one generation of workers who will in essence be exploited for the sake of the next generation or for the nation at large- and that is in the best case scenario- should they live in a repressive state like China et al they may not have other necessary freedoms to progress in any kind of natural sense. Like being involved in a prison labor scenario where whole peoples are in a kind of prison. My thinking comes down to the morality of promoting economies that rely on sweatshops – and perhaps it is the idea that developing economies seem to fixate on providing goods for export instead of focusing on developing domestic markets- like the Henry Ford idea of providing wages sufficient to create customers out of his workers. In the global economy there seems to be a deficiency in both the solidarity elements whereupon the consumers in the First World really indicate concern for the workers who are instrumental parts of the process that brings the products we buy in the marketplace. And, the subsidiarity question is also suspect when the local economic condition and the work in the local sweatshop is not the focus so much as the national income overall or the revenues of the corporation which stay primarily within a small circle in terms of distribution of profit.
First of all, a sweatshop is a label given a factory, company, or production method by its enemies. It’s a convenience that I haven’t challenged because for practical purposes you have to call them something and I’m not interested in creating and defending an unfamiliar neologism. But if you are going to make a moral definition, you are obligated to define your terms so people know where they stand.
What is the baseline economic condition, including its spiritual dimensions in a country that is pre-sweatshops, when it starts permitting their creation, and when they leave the country because they no longer are economic, having been driven out by other industries? Is there a better way to get to the last state of affairs than rerunning the sweatshop regime as has been done in country after country?
Here is my perception of the situation. Prior to sweatshops, the economy is horrible. People are subjected to all sorts of economic abuse. Life is hard and looks to be getting worse. There is little dignity to be had and everybody is insecure in their possessions. The elite has enough of an epiphany to change the rules of the game and new factories start. Some are started by locals, others come in and are run by foreigners but these factories are different than the grinding rural poverty. You get paid somewhat more reliably. Income is slightly higher, and there are promises of new skills and a path towards a better life. So second sons and daughters are encouraged to strike out and try this new life, in part because it avoids having to divide up the already too small smallholding again, in part because they are the spares of the family, which can more easily survive their loss if it all comes to tears. Over time, on average, the good news outweighs the bad and more and more people choose this life, which is hard, but not harder than the up at 4AM, finish work at 7PM farming existence. The countryside depopulates and land becomes available. Some families entirely move to the city and the country urbanizes. The factories can no longer just put out a sign and immediately get a long line of applicants and soon wages start rising as the factories compete for workers. The original factories start to leave to go elsewhere and they are replaced by others who offer still higher wages. People start to have money enough to organize and put an end to political impunity and corruption, or at least tamp it down and life measurably improves in fits and starts at an accelerating pace.
I see nothing immoral about this story. Now you might disagree that this story is a realistic description of a sweatshop economic cycle in a country. Or you might agree that it is realistic but see something immoral in this story. Or you might believe both things that I have the story wrong and there is something immoral to my story. Please tell me where you think I’m going wrong.
Now there is a very good reason why all these countries focus on exports. They steal. They steal a great deal. It’s a vicious cycle that would take a miracle to fix. But if they export, at least the elite has a way to keep more of their money. They just say pay into my foreign bank account (perfectly normal) and they only repatriate what they must to keep the economic cycle going. But those workers also learn how to squirrel their money away so it is somewhat out of reach of the local thieves. By creating a demand for their local currency to buy these increased exports, people up and down the economic scale are better able to protect their more mobile wealth.
Note that in all of this, first world anybody is mostly irrelevant. These undeveloped nations are undergoing these rule changes for local reasons. If you want them to act differently, you must answer their local desires in a better way which means more economic growth and better connectivity to more honest parts of the global economy.
Some interesting bits from the Pope Francis interview book I’ve mentioned are where he speaks specifically of the economic situation in Argentina- he says there is absolutely no reason for the country to be struggling with so many natural resources spread out over the country- but the economy is centered around a few large centers with everyone crowded these centers looking for a livelihood. I think the point is that the balance in a nation is found in the agrarian-industrial mixing- not one totally dominating the other- you could say that protection of family farms by various means and taking in the local environment to assess the smartest utilization of a given region rather than just creating an economy that is based on moving money around, skimming profits, a gambler’s arena with Big Players from all over the world determining things. I think of how the global economy wastes so much energy in sending food and products all over the place instead of creating local and national economies doing as much to be self-sufficient as possible. Now- I’m not sure how to accomplish the goal of creating humane economies of scale- by mandate- more international laws or stipulations within industries to self-regulate along these humane and environmentally-sensitive lines- or just go about the daily work of trying to promote the Gospel of Jesus Christ to penetrate as many hearts as humanly and superhumanly possible so that more leaders in the fields of industry and commerce will be more receptive to looking out for the little guys in their employ. What is the best course of action? All three pathways operating simultaneously? Of just the last path? The morality question always boils down to the Man-to-Man concrete situation, not some pet theory or ideology- in the concrete we see the obvious inhumanity of slavery- but theories and ideologies can serve to confuse and make difficult needed reforms to society or the systems guiding society. So, my read of Pope Francis and the Church social doctrine often comes back to the question of dealing with the concrete and the personal- as a consumer of stuff that usually comes from labor situations that are not keeping with my personal WWJD standards- I struggle- I try not to run away from the question or take a pat ideological escape route. When assessing the above I can’t help but think of the old phrase “Something smells rotten in Greece” when I buy another item that reads “Made in China” or other countries where I suspect I would be very despondent should I visit the factory or place of work where the item comes from. I would like to promote a Catholic network of more fairly traded products- like a Catholic Amway- but that will be the basis for another blog later.
Crony capitalism tends towards such clustering activities. If you get too far away from the centers of political power, you lose your visibility as a crony and become vulnerable to the vultures looking to pick your bones.
The truth is that nobody’s smart enough to reliably figure out what goes where and how hard to back it. We are all guessing. When we are guessing with our own money we tend to pay attention and cut our losses before we destroy too much capital. When it’s somebody else’s money, we allow pride to get in the way and tend to try to force things through beyond all reason.
Food, as a perishable commodity that is vital for life has to be spread around and it is a very good thing that we transport a lot of it. This way when there is a failure from bad weather, we have the infrastructure to shift food around to cover the deficit from beyond the drought or flood that ruined the crop. Even large, extended scale problems can be worked around. This is why famine is essentially a man made problem these days. People are hungry because armies are keeping the food out or politicians are stealing so much that people go hungry.
Actually asking the stockholders to bear the cost of treating labor like human beings? Cue to the libertarians …..
Pingback: What Would Jesus Do About Sweatshops?
One person’s sweatshop is another person’s job opportunity. If those who believe the establishments they call “sweatshops” are excessively rapacious, and are serious about their concerns, they should cooperate to capitalize and manage competing establishments that meet their definition of “equitable”. If they cannot (because the economics doesn’t work), or will not (because they have ‘more important things to do’), then their censorious bloviating can be safely tuned out as the hypocritical posturing it is.
Pingback: Our Lady's Seven Sorrows - BigPulpit.com
Thanks for bringing attention to this issue. On the one hand, it is good for poor nations to use their comparative advantage to manufacture goods at low prices and thereby lift their populations out of poverty, but this does not mean that there shouldn’t be a minimum level of safety and remuneration consistent with human dignity. The Church can do a lot to support the international organization effort necessary to secure this. As to your other point about Keady, I doubt there are large numbers of people who were about to be converted to his ant-sweatshop crusade until they happened upon his same-sex marriage stance (and if that’s happening, you’ve just done your part to undermine his efforts by outing him). I suspect there are much larger economic forces and financial temptations that keep the sweatshop issue from becoming a major issue for Catholics. In any case, just as Pope Francis recently encouraged us to work together with atheists on the worthy causes they also support, we shouldn’t allow someone’s error on one issue to undermine our support for them when they speak on the side of the Church.
You do not have to look abroad to find abusive sweatshops. Goodwill Industries in the famous USA hires disabled workers in the US for rates as low as 22 cents an hour. This in itself is a reason to rage against Goodwill and boycott and write scathing articles. The problem is in our backyard….
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/21/goodwill-workers-disabilities-low-wage_n_3478013.html
Ripe ground for RCC protest in the USA!!! Wore wages than in foreign lands…
Pingback: WWJD About Sweatshops? - CATHOLIC FEAST - Every day is a Celebration