June 25, 2009

• Garment workers in Bangladesh

     Rich-world protesters… should support increased numbers of [sweatshop] jobs, albeit under safer working conditions, by protesting the trade protectionism in their own countries that keeps out garment exports from countries such as Bangladesh…
     On one visit to Bangladesh, I picked up an English-language morning newspaper, where I found an extensive insert of interviews with young women working in the garment sector. These stories were poignant, fascinating, and eye-opening. One by one, they recounted the arduous hours, the lack of labor rights, and the harassment. What was most striking and unexpected about the stories was the repeated affirmation that this work was the greatest opportunity that these women could ever have imagined, and that their employment had changed their lives for the better. [emphasis mine -- Mark]
     Nearly all of the women interviewed had grown up in the countryside, extraordinarily poor, illiterate, and unschooled, and vulnerable to chronic hunger and hardship in a domineering, patriarchal society. Had they (and their forebearers of the 1970s and 1980s) stayed in the villages, they would have been forced into a marriage arranged by their fathers, and by seventeen or eighteen, forced to conceive a child. Their trek to the cities to take jobs has given these young women a chance for personal liberation of unprecedented dimension and opportunity.
    The Bangladeshi women told how they were able to save some small surplus from their meager pay, manage their own income, have their own rooms, choose when and whom to date and marry, choose to have children when they felt ready, and use their savings to improve their living conditions and especially to go back to school to enhance their literacy and job-market skills. As hard as it is, this life is a step on the way to economic opportunity that was unimaginable in the countryside in generations past.
     Some rich-country protesters have argued that Dhaka’s apparel firms should either pay far higher wage rates or be closed, but closing such factories as a result of wages forced above worker productivity would be little more than a ticket for these women back to rural misery… Virtually every poor country that has developed successfully has gone through these first stages of industrialization.

     That’s Jeffrey Sachs writing in The End of Poverty. Those jobs seem abysmal to Americans, but they are a great hope for the citizens of poor countries, and I don’t want to deny them that opportunity. I’d much rather see such factories succeed. They’ll attract competition and their workers will acquire skills, driving up productivity and wages.
     Here’s another problem with fair-trade agriculture: paying farmers above the market rate attracts people into farming rather than factories. And in the long term, agriculture will not be the way out of poverty for these countries. Economic development requires industrialization.

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