Sweatshops, Underdevelopment, and Progress

Growing up, the word sweatshop had vivid imagery: cramped, hot, grueling, and exploitative. Eventually, I contextualized that situation within the history of colonialism and capitalism. Sweatshops seemed a sort of neo-slavery: when the rich could no longer directly enslave the less fortunate, they turned to business, offering pittance wages and developing a system of cheap foreign labor that stocks the shelves of Macy's and Wal-mart and drives corporate profit. But eventually another question presented itself: why do people work in sweatshops? The answer is complex. They do not, literally, have to - they can quit (in fact, the threat of severance is often used to ensure acceptance of harsh conditions and low pay). Yet they have little alternative. Some are born in cities with no other prospects, others migrate from the countryside and hope to send money back to their families. Sweatshops are the first rung on the social ladder, the story goes. So can we work to eradicate them, eviscerating the one meager opportunity of the poor? Companies argue that higher standards of wages or conditions will effectively do just that - restrain business conditions and force firms to shut down their operations. For me, the answer lies beyond the cities in the countryside where people historically dwelt.

Why leave their ancestral home? Underdevelopment is a widely used term, connotative of hunger and disease. Yet I will not believe that the pre-industrial world was brutish and ugly, identical with the one poor third-worlders now flee for sweatshops. One anthropologist suggested altering our conception of underdevelopment from that of a noun to a verb: it is a process that has created the state of misery we observe today. This is a powerful distinction. It essentially supports the thesis that sweatshops are a new form of the same old colonial exploitation: we came in, destroyed their land, stole their treasure, and left with no alternatives, they were forced onto plantations (and later into factories). There is one omission in that explanation, however: time. We cannot turn back the clock on underdevelopment by reeling in the forces of industry and restoring the third world to its pristine, natural state. Take the example of cash cropping. Rather than growing food and eating it, goods are grown and sold at market. Cash cropping is desirable because tobacco or sugar is worth more than maize - thus, you can buy more food than you would have grown. With cheaper food available and labor in high demand, population grows - and grows, beyond the point that was naturally sustainable. In the process, nutrition plummets, disease spreads, and vast tracts of land are converted to monocultures. Suddenly the bottom falls out of the sugar market, and workers are forced to leave and seek work elsewhere.

This is a simplistic story of underdevelopment, but it is nevertheless emblematic. Poor peoples are only "under" the standards of the industrialized world - they lack the machinery and infrastructure to subsist independently within the industrialized system. Returning to the state of affairs prior to colonization would require massive reversals: soil would need to regain nutrients, mining cyanide cleansed from aquifers, diseases eradicated, forests re-grown, dams unbuilt, but most importantly and repugnantly people would have to die in huge numbers. This is not possible, and for the latter reason, wholly undesirable. But if de-underdevelopment is out of the cards, is development the only other option? If underdevelopment is a lack of adaptation to the changes set in place by industrial colonization, then development would be successful adaptation: tractors, freeways, shopping malls, skyscrapers; in short, USA the Sequel. I find this idea disturbing. I believe strongly that the third world deserves to be restored to a humane condition, and would not impede that goal out of ideological aversion to my own homeland. The only hope, then, is to create a new world. This is undeniably ambitious. Quite justifiable, many in the third world are busy enough trying to combat malaria and improve economic opportunity; they have no time or resources to pursue experimental and potentially fruitless paths to "a brighter future". Yet I only pray they will. That is, until I can help them.