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This is a moral dichotomy that's been around for ages and I have yet to see a satisfactory answer on: are sweatshops evil because the workers are grossly underpaid and work in terrible conditions, or are they good because they're better than nothing and people will apparently starve to death otherwise?

Who should bear the responsibility of that decision? The workers? The governments of the workers? The governments of the consumers? Or the consumers?

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Yes, the government and the sweatshop owners are working hand-in-hand to exploit workers and both are culpable. Sometimes they like to present themselves as good cop / bad cop [0].

First, the ability to be self-sufficient is curtailed by the government through entitlements granted to a select few by the ruling class.

The Enclosures in England [1] are the canonical example. Agricultural land once used by everyone is privatized. With their livelihood threatened, the rural populations are driven to the cities to seek employment in dangerous factories.

Most industrial societies are based on this concept. The sweatshop isn't doing anyone any favors. They are simply another side of the same coin.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_cop/bad_cop

[1] http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust...

> This is a moral dichotomy that's been around for ages and I have yet to see a satisfactory answer on: are sweatshops evil because the workers are grossly underpaid and work in terrible conditions, or are they good because they're better than nothing and people will apparently starve to death otherwise?

One common answer -- and part of the reason why capitalism [0] has basically been replaced by the modern mixed economy (which, confusingly, is often called "capitalism", though its not really, being more of a synthesis between the thesis of 19th century capitalism and its antithesis in 19th century socialism) everywhere in the developed world since at least the middle of the last century -- is that sweatshops are evil for the first reason, and capitalism is evil for the second reason.

[0] the 19th Century system for which the term was coined.

Factories and jobs in China (and other countries with factories) are good (in general, at least). It doesn't get much simpler than that. The only people that have issues with it are the consumers thousands of miles away who are completely detached from the issue and realities facing those workers, and who at the same time fuel demand by purchasing and funding those workers.

> The only people that have issues with it are the consumers thousands of miles away who are completely detached from the issue and realities facing those workers, and who at the same time fuel demand by purchasing and funding those workers.

Ok, that is just not true. Tell that to the garment workers here that were shot last year by government police while protesting low wages and poor working conditions.

I agree with you. That's bad.

That says that jobs are good. It says nothing about the sweatshops.

Of course if you just make a statement such as the "bad factories" are bad, then yes. The problem is people use the term sweatshop for any factory, because most people using the term are not doing so with much weight.

Because there's absolutely no reason for them to be "bad". There is no reason whatsoever that we have to allow sweatshops to exist.

>This is a moral dichotomy that's been around for ages and I have yet to see a satisfactory answer on: are sweatshops evil because the workers are grossly underpaid and work in terrible conditions, or are they good because they're better than nothing and people will apparently starve to death otherwise?

it is a false dichotomy for many reasons. One of them - the most basic one - is that we have high productivity enough in the developed world to not allow former sweatshops workers to starve.

It's not a false dichotomy because it is something that exists today. The workers can either work for next to nothing in terrible conditions, or they can starve.

Better situations exist and are possible, but they do not prove the nonexistence of the former.

I think GP had it right that this is a false dichotomy, that being "a type of informal fallacy that involves a situation in which only limited alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

False dichotomy doesn't mean that one of the options doesn't exist, it means there is an additional option not being considered -- that is, industry and government coordinating to create safe working environments and pay livable wages.

Anecdotes from 70's South Korea: Sweatshops can have atrocious working condition (poor lighting that hurts your eyes, poor chairs, ceiling so low that you can't even stand up, working 10+ hours a day). Many workers died young from various health problems they developed.

Regarding "starve to death" part, the government also suppressed crop prices so that these aforementioned workers could make their living with horribly low wages. Of course, this in turn meant that farming villages couldn't support as many people as they could if the price was determined by free market, ensuring a stream of people eager to work in factories.

So it's not exactly "sweatshops keep people from starving to death." Sometimes, those who enable sweatshops also make sure (whether intentionally or through apathy) that people would otherwise live one step from starvation.

On the other hand, decades of misery transformed South Korea into one of the world's leading industrial nations, so... I guess it's complicated.

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