Argumentative+Essay+-+Sweatshops

By Felicity Lawrence // The Guardian //, November 21, 2002
 * Sweatshop Campaigners Demand Gap Boycott **


 * * Boycott: to refuse to buy goods from a company **

Gap clothes stores are being targeted by campaigners who presented new evidence yesterday that the company is making extensive use of sweatshop labor. Africa Forum and Unite, the union of textile employees, called for Christmas shoppers to **boycott** the international retailer, which operates 130 clothes shops across the UK.

Gap is encouraging the exploitation of workers in six countries, the activists say. They presented a New York conference yesterday with documented evidence of "abusive working conditions" collected from interviews with 200 people in more than 40 factories making Gap garments in Cambodia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Lesotho, El Salvador and Mexico for the company's global network of more than 4,000 shops.

To support their claims the union and Africa Forum invited laborers from Indonesia, Lesotho and El Salvador to describe their working conditions. They gave accounts of working long hours for low pay, and facing health hazards and brutal working conditions at factories making Gap products.

Tebello, a Lesotho garment worker whose family members have become seriously ill as a result of working in a factory supplying Gap, said: "The factory is dusty. We can't escape breathing in the fibers. When we cough, if the T-shirt we were working on was made of blue fabric, then our mucus would be full of blue fibers."

A Bangladeshi worker employed at a Gap factory in Chitagong recounted physical abuse at her plant. "If we make simple mistakes, they beat us up. I made some small mistakes one time, so the supervisor came and slapped my head and pulled my ears. And if we make mistakes, they don't pay us for our work." An Indonesian worker from a Gap plant in north Jakarta described how low wages left employees unable to buy enough to eat.

The union accused Gap of driving down wages. "Gap does not readily disclose the locations of its factories. But now workers in Gap factories have reported abuses that demonstrate a pattern of global exploitation," it says. "We want Gap to stop exploiting sweatshop labor around the world," union organizer Steve Weingarten said. "We want them to pay a wage that allows a decent standard of living and allow workers to organize unions to improve their conditions in factories."

Gap insists that it does all it can to minimize the exploitation of workers. "We share the same concerns but we are proud of the work we do in factories. We're not perfect but we believe we make a difference to workers' lives," said Gap's European spokesperson, Anita Borzyszkowska.

Gap has responded to previous scandals about sweatshop labor by drawing up a strict code of practice for the 3,600 factories it works with around the world, and has a large monitoring team, Ms. Borzyszkowska added.

The call for a boycott will be a severe blow to the company, which was just starting to emerge from a period of decline. It has focused on improving the quality of its garments. Both the US Gap Inc and Gap International, the company covering the UK stores, reported profits in October for the first time in 20 months.

How influential any boycott call will be is unclear. Two new studies suggest that consumers are not prepared to put their money where their mouths are on ethical trading. Research International polled 1,500 young urban shoppers in 41 countries and found consumers were prepared to turn a blind eye to ethical malpractices when they involved favorite brands.


 * Governments Should Not Boycott Sweatshop Products **

//Child Labor and Sweatshops, 2011// //Cheryl Grey is a contributing writer to the online magazine Citizen Economists and writes a blog regarding current economic subjects.//

To many Americans, sweatshops seem horrific, with back-breaking hours and unhealthy working conditions—so much so, that the honorable reaction ought to be a boycott of sweatshop products. In reality, however, boycotting such products would deprive workers the opportunity to rise above poverty, and deprive countries the opportunity to develop effective economies. Although it is not a pretty picture, the sweatshop system has proved to be successful and should be allowed to run its course.

Even in our modern world, sweatshops remain a horrifying reality, with hundreds of thousands of the world's poor and defenseless people exploited by wealthy factory owners and greedy supervisors. Their jobs, perhaps better termed “slavery,” involve back-breaking hours in pitiful conditions, sometimes using toxic chemicals without adequate ventilation or protective gloves or goggles, for pennies per day. Stories of children stitching fancy beadwork by candlelight at midnight, and workers refusing to drink fluids in sweltering heat to prevent the necessity of bathroom breaks, are all too common and all too true.

Boycotting goods made by sweatshop labor only hurts the workers. So, how could there be a good side to this? And why would any self-respecting industrialized nation purchase products made in such a fashion? The instinctive, gut-level reaction is to boycott these goods; is that wrong? In a word, yes.
 * __ Better than the Alternative __**

On average, the employees of sweatshops work there because they have no better alternative. Children work in such conditions, not instead of going to school, but because they have no school to attend or no means to support themselves if they do. Parents work there because the alternative is watching their children drop out of school and work ... or starve.

It's a painful fact that boycotting goods made by sweatshop labor only hurts the workers, not the factory owners. In 1993, a U.S. boycott forced Bangladeshi factories to quit utilizing child labor. According to Oxfam //[a group of nongovernmental organizations working to fight poverty and injustice]//, most of those displaced children were forced into worse positions, when their first choice had been to sew clothing for Wal-Mart shoppers.

Being without better alternatives, the people who have sweatshop jobs are often glad to have them and see them as a positive beginning for a better life. Journalists Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square massacre [involving a 1989 student protest], recounted multiple stories of Chinese sweatshop workers who were puzzled when Western journalists bemoaned their twelve-hour-plus workdays, seven days per week. More than one young woman they interviewed said how great it was that the factory allowed them to work such long hours, and others commented they had taken that job deliberately over others in the area to earn more hourly pay.
 * __ Opportunity for Betterment __**

According to an article by entrepreneur and chief executive officer of the nonprofit Flow, Michael Strong in 2006, roughly 1.2 million people rise above poverty in China every month by moving to an urban area and taking a job that pays less than US$2 per day. He claims that Wal-Mart, through allowing developing economies access to industrialized markets, has helped more of the world's desperately poor than the World Bank and relates the story of a Mongolian student who, when he heard U.S. college students ripping into sweatshops, shouted out, "Please, give us your sweatshops!"

If China continues growing at its current rate, in 2031 it will reach a standard of living comparable to that in the U.S. It's the same path taken by Japan in the 1950s and 1960s and the Asian tigers [Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan] in the 1970s and 1980s. It's an ugly path, dirty and brutal. But it's proven to work. Can the same be said for other forms of foreign aid?

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