Only if the child prostitutes had made the decision to work as child prostitutes themselves, and were above the age of consent.

Although in that case we would probably not consider them to be child prostitutes.

(And if they had not made the decision to work as prostitutes themselves, and had been forced into it by others, I would consider that a campaign to get them shorter working hours or higher wage rates was rather missing the point.)

Basically, I think we need to separate out where the real ethical problems lie. The problem isn’t the sweatshop. If someone who was wealthy decided that they enjoyed working 80 hour weeks and just worked really hard for the hell of it, then few people would consider that an ethical problem. The problem is the situation around the sweatshop. And that is lack of wealth which is usually accompanied by a lack of other things, like access to justice systems and property rights.

This is why it is no good for market liberals to say “well sweatshops are better than nothing”. They may be, but if they exist in a situation where alternative options for employment or economic growth are limited by a lack of sound institutions or bad or corrupt institutions, then it is not as if we can sleep soundly. The exploitation is in the fact that people’s options have been artificially limited to working for some government-licensed globally powerful companies. So we need to push for a much deeper reform in these countries rather than just hoping that free market rights respecting institutions develop via osmosis.

well, just to be clear, only in so far as in both cases one could potentially make a “don’t make things worse” argument; but if the fact of the matter is that cracking down on child prostitution wouldn’t make things worse, but some proposed attempt to crack down on sweatshops would make things worse, then I wouldn’t be making the same argument in both cases. On the basis that we can be fairly sure cracking down on child prostitution won’t make things worse, hold fire on those wrist bands.

I’m not trying to argue that “nothing can be done” about sweatshops, I’m only expressing concerns about UK legislators trying to do things like stipulate wages in overseas garment manufacturing. For what it’s worth, I should think the thing most likely to “do something” about sweatshops in most countries is the arrival of more sweatshops, competition for labour, higher wages, perhaps organised labour activisim, legislative reforms in the respective countries, and, hopefully, the whole happy process of economic growth. I wouldn’t suggest this is inevitable in every sweat shop hosting nation.

As to the morality …. well that’s a thorny one, ain’t it? The wages and working conditions experienced by workers in poor countries, working domestically with no contact with global trade, are frequently terrible (and as claimed by research linked to above, frequently worse than in so called sweat shops). I presume you wouldn’t want to call all operators of domestic businesses in poor countries just one moral grade above pimping out kids. Why should the moral status of business owners change as soon as they start selling to Western importers?

Whatever the prevailing levels of wages and working conditions are in a given poor country, domestic and exporting sweatshop, some owners are going to be bastards relative to other owners, and I share what I imagine are your views on them. But it’s not obvious to me that all the owners of factories that export to the west are bastards, if the pay and conditions they offer are similar (or, as research suggests, slightly better) than what goes on elsewhere in that country.

What of the morality of Western firms that buy from sweatshops? If they seek out the bastards, well they’re bastards too. But if they buy from businesses that offer workers the same or better wages and conditions that prevail in the country in question, I think there’s a case they are helping people in that country (creating jobs tightens the labour market and each new entrant should move wages in the right direction), and I don’t think that people who help people (even out of self interest) in poor countries deserve the moral opprobrium you suggest.

[I wish I could find the cross country research I have in mind, but there are case studies, like Vietnam and I think Mauritius that show I'm not just spouting crap about sweat shops leading to poverty reduction, by the way.]

Could they Luis? Might the Adam Smith Institute hand out wristbands saying “I fuck poor children from poor countries”?

See there are two questions here – the empirical, legal one you mention, about whether something can be done about sweat-shops. The less important one, which is clouding the issue, is what we think about the people who run sweat-shops.

I appreciate that some sappy lefties think the latter question should dictate the former. But it looks to me as if the reverse of that is also true.

I might be persuadable that nothing can be done about sweat-shops, because any attempt to do something will be counterproductive. But it would certainly help if the people making that case didn’t think that running a sweat-shop is just a fine and dandy way to make a living. On that question I’ll concede that it’s morally preferable to pimping out kids, but that’s about as far as I’ll go.

let’s hope this happens in Bangladesh too – and some help from Bangladesh’s export customers could help. But there’s a difference between helping ratchet up working conditions, and wading in thinking you can set the right wage from 4000 miles away.

Because we’re rich of course.

QED.

Of course there would have been equivalents of Tim in those days saying “don’t demand better conditions – you’ll only hurt yourselves in the long run (I’m exploiting you for your own good!)”. I suggest that progressives, socialists, democrats etc should respond to such arguments, in the same way that people in those days would have done (basically telling them to fuck off)..

They do? Really? You know what the profit margins in sweatshops in Bangladesh are do you?

“What I wanted from you was a moral defense of your justification for the hyper exploitation of children ”

Anyway, I reject the very idea that employing someone is to exploit them. Sorry, but I simply haven’t swallowed that Marxist bullshit. The labourer gets a higher income by being employed alongside capital than they would be working in the absence of capital. So it’s just as true to say that the labourer is exploiting capital as it is to say that capital is exploiting labour.

“to be any limit on the extent to which children are exploited in the service of “wealth creation” (read capital accumulation here)”

No, you’re betraying your Marxist idiocies again. Wealth creation is not the same as capital accumulation. If we move a resource from a lower value use to a higher value one then we have engaged in wealth creation. That’s it, tout court. We don’t have to blather on about the misconceptions of a 19th century German at all. It was all entirely and satisfactorarily explained by an 18th century Scot.

“I would say that is an unacceptable high price to pay for the promise of jam tomorrow.”

So, we don’t have jam today and we won’t have jam tomorrow then either? Look, the reason that poor children in poor countries have shitty lives is because they are poor children in poor countries. A shitty life is what poverty means. The only way out of it is for the economy to develop, for it to add more value, so that there is (leaving aside the insane nonsense about “capital exploiting labour”) more wealth so that fewer people are shit poor.

I’m not saying that child labour is some inevitable stage that an economy must go through, I’m not saying that it’s good, necessary or worth it for economic development to take place.

I’m saying that right here right now those children either work at something or they die of starvation. Yes, it’s shitty, it’s appalling but that is the way that the world currently is. What we all want to do is get away from that, to a situation where happy children do indeed gambol in the streets as they come home from their exciting day learning the three r’s and making plasticine snakes.

The question is: how?

Given that the problem is poverty then the answer must be the eradication of poverty. No, not throwing kids out of the factories so that they starve: that will indeed solve *their* poverty permanently but that’s not really quite what we’re after is it?

There’s even been a rather large study which shows us (one way) that this might be achieved. This.
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate/ipcc/emission/093.htm#1

The A1 family. It’s one of the economic models that is then fed into the IPCC’s climate change models. No one around here is going to say that something like that, something which we are basing the entirety of the future of the human race (hyperbole alert from Mr. Monbiot there), is not thought through now, are they?

That A1 model is essentially globalised capitalism. And poverty, this sort of child labour poverty that we’re talking about, is entirely abolished in that model via the only method possible: the creation of wealth.

So let’s get on with it, eh?

Perhaps it is the case that in some countries outlawing child prostitution (or enforcing those laws) would lead to some children starving to death. If that was the case, I’d reconsider the wisdom of enforcing those laws, wouldn’t you? Obviously I’d want to get to a situation where there are no child prostitutes and nobody starving to death, and if it was possible to ban child prostitution and stop them starving, I’d choose that option. The same sort of thing goes for sweatshops.

If I thought that sweatshop legislation would lead, on balance, to better lives for the poor of the world, I’d be all for it. If I could see an argument whereby the legislation would might make things worse for the poor in the short run but better in the long run, I’d be all for it too (if the trade off is favourable). But then that’d be you selling jam tomorrow.

Tim, is this your position too?

Don’t knock child prostitution, Tim, it’s less awful than child soldiering, or medical experimentation. The point is things can be less awful than other things and still be very awful indeed. You’ve acknowledged the existence of a trade-off between short term and longer term interests, but failed to make any comment at all about whee the balance should be or how it could be altered.

It’s not just children in factories. It’s extremely young children in extremely poor conditions, for extremely long hours, and extremely little money. I would say that is an unacceptable high price to pay for the promise of jam tomorrow.

Hyper-exploitation is no more loaded than any of the terminology you use. It merely denotes that the children’s employers make large profits from their labour power. Hardly controversial is it – they’re only employed because they are incredibly cheap and expendable after all.

What I wanted from you was a moral defense of your justification for the hyper exploitation of children – notably by asking you which aspect of your defense could not be argued with equal vigor in defense of child prostitution. You didn’t address the question, instead you persisted with your pseudoscientific economic arguments (“wealth creation”, now there’s a value laden expression hiding behind the façade of scientific objectivity if ever there was one).

The reason I asked Tim is that in your defense of child labour there does not appear to be any limit on the extent to which children are exploited in the service of “wealth creation” (read capital accumulation here) that’s why I’m asking you in what sense your moral argument does not apply with equal force to child prostitution. I’m not interested in your Hayekian bullshit, I’d like you to address this more fundamental concern.

Settle down now. I am not sneering at hippies (I think that was Tim). I did read the article, I didn’t miss they weren’t calling for a boycott, I did write something about boycotts that didn’t fit under this post, a mistake I acknowledged (that was me addressing the representative “sweatshop campaigner” in my head, rather than what Jess wrote).

I don’t think setting a “living wage” is easy. Your suggestion was to legislate that garment manufacturers in Bangladesh must pay a wage equal to the average wage (let’s say the median) across the economy. As Tim points out, it’s entirely possible that sweatshops already pay a wage at or higher than the host country median wage – see research on that I link to #15. Regardless of what you find “patronizing”.

Presumably your objective is to achieve a significant increase in wages paid by sweat shops. So, how large an increase do you choose to impose via legislation, and how do you pin it down? I do not think this problem is “easy” – there’s the effect on employment levels to worry about, plus the other consequences I mention, most pressing of which is probably changes to who gets the jobs once they become so much better than other jobs on offer. The fact that you find it easy to answer “paying them the average perhaps” suggests to me you just haven’t thought about it.

Setting wage controls in general isn’t easy – relative wages change all the time as different sectors expand and contract, or experience technological change, and there’s no reason to expect relative wages (the garment wage compared to other wages) to be the same across countries. Perhaps in some countries legislating that garment manufacturers must pay a wage equal to the economy average would wipe out the industry, in others it would equate to a pay cut. Picking the “right” wage would be hard enough for one country, let alone imagining UK legislators could design something to identify a fair wage for garment workers in 100 LDCs.

I think the only way the Fairtrade organization can do it, is that they have a benchmark (say, the world price for coffee) and can then say “10% more than that”. But if the whole world became fair trade, how could they set the “fair” price of coffee.

As I’ve noted above, the last time someone tried to get the child labour kicked out of sweatshops the kids kicked out did end up in child prostitution. As I tend to think that a child working in a factory is less awful than child prostitution (anyone care to disagree?) then I support that possibility of children working in a factory because it is less awful than the alternative which will be, for at least some of them, child prostitution.

Now, would I like there to be more options? You know, decent schooling, three squares a day and a loving and stimulating home life as an alternative for these children? Sure, let’s get on with creating it. That means creating wealth for it is only wealth that creates such opportunities.

Err, that’s what I just said.

“Yes, and that only happens due to improved working standards. Without that they could be paid the same pittance they were before.”

Rubbish. As Paul Krugman keeps pointing out (and he is indeed a Nobel Laureate and the prize was indeed given for his expertise and research into international trade) average wages in an economy are determined by average productivity in an economy. As the latter rises so will the former (in a market economy anyway: and you can find Marx agreeing with you there on both those points too.).

Demanding “higher standards” does not raise wages. Indede, if you start demanding higher standards in hte form of more holiday, more sick pay, safer working conditions and so on these will lower wages, not raise them.

Not necessarily. Due to high unemployment in those countries they are most likely working for a pittance because they have little alternatives.

We’re not talking about what *you* would pay a factory worker, but what average wages in cities would be. It’s highly patronising to assume Banglsdesh, India et al are just full of villages where people survive on next to nothing.

hat and China between them are the largest reduction of poverty ever in the history of the human species.

Yes, and that only happens due to improved working standards. Without that they could be paid the same pittance they were before.