Everything We Knew About Sweatshops Was Wrong

By ocean-kat on Sat, 04/29/2017 - 3:42am |

In the 1990s, Americans learned more about the appalling conditions at the factories and opposition to sweatshops surged. But some economists pushed back. For them, the wages and conditions in sweatshops might be appalling, but they are an improvement on people’s less visible rural poverty. Expecting to prove the experts right, we went to Ethiopia and performed the first randomized trial of industrial employment on workers. Little did we anticipate that everything we believed would turn out to be wrong.

URL:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/opinion/do-sweatshops-lift-workers-out-of-poverty.html

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Who is the "we" quoted in the article who thought sweatshops were a good alternative?

by rmrd0000 on Sat, 04/29/2017 - 9:15am

I thought of posting this myself.

What I found the most interesting is that the micro-capitalism is what a lot of the quitters wanted. Everybody wants to be working for themselves selling stuff or services to everyone else, free-lance or operating their own business. Because they can be their own boss, and chose their hours, supposedly. Which farming once was. Where they will no doubt work many more hours than in a sweatshop and maybe even for less, but have a sense of control over their lives, schedule, and behavior. (As most of us doing same for a long time know: the sense of control is an illusion, but the ability to take time for emergencies or even for slacking and to behave as you chose is not.)

by artappraiser on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 4:22pm

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