Sweatshops Don't Just Happen - They're a Policy

[marmar]

Sweatshops Don't Just Happen - They're a Policy

Tuesday, 25 June 2013 09:39
By David L. Wilson, Truthout | Op-Ed


On May 5, The New York Times dedicated its "Sunday Dialogue" feature to letters about the factory collapse in Bangladesh that had killed more than 1,100 garment workers a week and a half earlier. The "dialogue" started with a letter from University of Michigan business school professor Jerry Davis, who apportioned blame for the disaster to "the owners of the building and the factories it contained, to the government of Bangladesh, to the retailers who sold the clothing," and to us. Through "[o]ur willingness to buy garments sewn under dangerous conditions," he wrote, we "create the demand that underwrites these tragedies."

There's a striking omission in Prof. Davis' list - the people whose policies make the sweatshop economy possible.

For more than three decades, US politicians, think tanks and columnists have promoted an economic program known in most of the world as neoliberalism. Here in North America, we use nicer-sounding terms like "free markets," "free trade" and "globalization," but the effect on developing nations is the same.

Trade agreements like NAFTA slash the tariffs that once protected local farmers from competition with the industrialized world's government-subsidized agribusinesses. Driven off the land by cheap imports, the farmers find themselves in cities already filled with workers whose jobs were eliminated by privatization and austerity, policies that international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed as loan conditions. Meanwhile, the same trade agreements that have thrown millions of desperate jobseekers onto the labor market also make it cost-effective for multinational corporations to transfer factory work from their own countries to the Global South. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/17183-sweatshops-dont-just-happen-theyre-a-policy