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.

__________________