There has been some confusion surrounding the definition of a sweatshop and the intentions of the campus anti-sweatshop movement. The non-profit organization Global Exchange defines a sweatshop as "any factory where workers are not paid a living wage, exposed to dangerous and exploitative conditions, or are unable to form unions." A factory is a sweatshop only if it exhibits one of these conditions. The Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor rights monitoring organization, is one of the major bodies working to end sweatshop labor. Its purpose is to conduct unannounced inspections of factories, without corporate bias, and publicize their findings. As of February 21, 2008, 180 universities have affiliated with the WRC. The Designated Supplier Program was developed by the WRC and United Students Against Sweatshops as a procurement plan for ending sweatshop labor in the manufacturing of collegiate apparel. Implemented in phases, the DSP ensures licensees source collegiate apparel from humanely operated factories. Forty universities already support the DSP.
Most of the garments we wear are not made in the Unites States, but in countries like China where the average pay is 31 cents per hour at its highest, or Bangladesh where the average ranges from 11-20 cents an hour, according to the National Labor Committee. If University of Houston administrators do not affiliate with the WRC and adopt the DSP, they will be in effect be condoning an hourly wage of less than a quarter, not to mention child labor, dangerous working environments and modern slavery. To condone child labor is to negate the necessity of an education. Children toiling in sweatshops 60 hours a week cannot attend school. Instead, they are forced to trade knowledge for pennies and disrespect. If their parents were paid a living wage, they could attend school. It is ironic that a University administration would not value a child’s education.
It is a commonly held view that by creating sweatshops in developing countries, we are doing the country an economic favor. Economists cite comparative advantage, yet it is not an analytical entailment that both countries will benefit beyond the short term. Implicit in this argument is the stability of resources. If the sole resource is cheap labor, then for the developing nation to continue to profit, it must sustain its resources, and in the case of a "cheap labor workforce," an impoverished and uneducated population is detrimental to the long-term development of the country. When sweatshops are used in developing countries, it is frequently coupled with environmentally unstable practices, thus the country will lose its comparative advantage in natural resources.
Sweatshop labor is attractive for businesses because it increases profit margins by decreasing labor costs. Many countries with sweatshops reduce regulations related to human rights and the environment, in order to attract transnational corporations. This creates two problems. First, the workers are not paid sufficient wages to escape a cycle of poverty and second pollution in the developing country rises.
Another common sweatshop argument utilizes a historic perspective and claims the majority of developed nations employed sweatshop labor, or even hosted sweatshop labor within their borders. Therefore, sweatshops are a sign of progress in developing nations. This argument opens its proponents to supporting slavery, sexism, genocide, and fascism among others (many of which were employed by countries one time or another), and assumes a linear model for progress when people extend this argument to justify creating new sweatshops in regions where they did not previously exist.
More devastating to the historic perspective argument is that when sweatshops were common in America, we did not have an exogenous government or corporation imposing and enforcing self-interested regulations on it that biased its market and restricted domestic economic growth. One of the main pressures for outlawing sweatshops in America was internal.
This will not work in contemporary developing countries since there is an overwhelming external influence. If a developing country enacted more rigid worker’s rights, it would cease to attract and maintain transnational corporations, who would migrate to regions that did not have these restrictions, and thus cheaper labor. If a transnational corporation prioritizes cheap labor, it will want to preserve this "resource", utilizing its overwhelming influence to erect or dismantle laws in and against its favors, respectively. Thus, there is no guarantee that sweatshops in developing countries will lead to "developed" status in the environment of unregulated worker’s rights, since an imposing superpower is omitted from the historic perspective argument.
When we eliminate the use of sweatshop labor in the production of collegiate apparel, the cost per item is expected to rise by a quarter. This does not seem like much, but it is more than the average Bangladeshi sweatshop worker makes per hour. The WRC requires a minimum annual affiliation fee of $1,000, which is very little considering UH’s total budget; a whopping $984,177,030 according to its Web site. The fee will not even make a dent in the university’s funds, yet if given, it will change the lives of hundreds of workers for the better.
