Apparently Perspective Matters

Nicholas Kristof, of the leftist New York Times, has written a piece on sweatshops in developing countries and the lift out of poverty they provide their people. From the article:

Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.

Talk to these families in the dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children.

“I’d love to get a job in a factory,” said Pim Srey Rath, a 19-year-old woman scavenging for plastic. “At least that work is in the shade. Here is where it’s hot.”

Another woman, Vath Sam Oeun, hopes her 10-year-old boy, scavenging beside her, grows up to get a factory job, partly because she has seen other children run over by garbage trucks. Her boy has never been to a doctor or a dentist, and last bathed when he was 2, so a sweatshop job by comparison would be far more pleasant and less dangerous.

Not that I'm a fan of sweat shops, but any trade agreements in the west need to be careful not to stunt the growth of the manufacturing sector of the east. It takes time for economies to grow, and we can't expect the people of China to enjoy the living standards of the west over night simply because we say they should. Sweatshops existed in the west once, too, and they built a lot of the wealth and capital we've been enjoying for the past century.